Methods sheet » Overview

The results presented on this website concentrate on an indicator framework to develop a top-down macro overview on the technological capabilities in sustainability technologies in NICs. The following technological fields were included under the heading of green technologies: (1) energy efficiency, both in buildings and in industry, (2) environmental friendly energy supply technologies, including renewable energy, cogeneration and CO2 neutral fossil fuels, but excluding nuclear energy, (3) material efficiency, including renewable resources and ecodesign of products (4) transport technologies, (5) water technologies, and (6) waste management technologies. The countries covered are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and Venezuela. For Taiwan, only part of the data could be collected; therefore the aggregated numbers do not include Taiwan, but reference is made in the overall interpretation based on the partial data available.

Measuring technological capabilities can draw on the experience with innovation indicators made over the last two decades. Empirical results for the following aspects are presented:

• Sustainability innovations require good framework conditions for innovations in general. The analysis uses the survey data of the World Economic Forum 2008, which is based on expert opinions. In order to obtain an innovation system index, factor analysis was used to classify the indicators into five innovation factors labeled learning, governance, entrepreneurship, openness and skilled labor. For this index, 55 countries are taken into account, comprising OECD countries as well as NICs and a few developing countries for which the indicator values are available. The index values are normalized in a way that a value of zero indicates that the general innovation capabilities of a country are estimated to be at the average of all 55 countries included in the survey.
• In order to evaluate the general consideration of social and environmental criteria by the actors in the National Innovation System within their decision processes, i.e. the societal anchoring of the sustainability concept as a leading principle in the technological development process, data from the expert opinion surveys of the World Economic Forum (WEF; 2008) and the Institute of Management Development (IMD, 2006) is used. For this index, the same 55 countries as for the general innovation framework are taken into account. Furthermore, factor analysis was used to construct the index.
• Publication data is taken from the SCOPUS literature and citation databank. The classification which SCOPUS provides for “Environmental Journals” was used in a first step. With the help of a key words search strategy as filter, the articles were narrowed down to the ones which are related to the 6 sustainability technology areas.
• Patents are among the most used indicators in innovation research. They belong to the intermediate output indicators of measuring the build-up of a knowledge base, and are directly related to technological capabilities. The analysis draws on patent applications at the World Intellectual Property Organization and thus transnational patents (for the concept see Frietsch and Schmoch 2010). In this way, a method of mapping international patents is employed which does not target individual markets but is much more transnational in character. The patents identified in this way reveal those segments in which patent applicants are already taking a broader international perspective. The latest year available is 2007, the years 2003 – 2007 were chosen as the period of study so that a statistically more reliable population is achieved in which random fluctuations in individual years are evened out.
• International trade figures indicate the degree to which a country is able to compete internationally. As argued above, the competitiveness with regard to technology intensive goods is influenced by the technological capabilities of the countries. Sustainability innovations mostly fall into the category of sectors which are classified as medium-high-technologies industries. Thus, trade figures for these technologies also indicate the degree of technological capabilities. The database UN-COMTRADE is referred to for trade figures. The classification of the technologies is using the Harmonized System (HS) 2002. This foreign trade classification allows more disaggregation and therefore a better targeting of the sustainability technologies compared with the older classifications common in international comparisons (Standard International Trade Classification SITC). The latest year available for the analysis was 2007.

For patents and world trade, the share of the NICs at the world total was calculated (patent share, world export share). Furthermore, specialization indicators (relative patent advantage (RPA), relative export activity (RXA), relative literate advantage (RLA) and revealed comparative advantage (RCA) were calculated, in order to analyze whether or not the NICs specialize on the sustainability technologies:

For every country i and every technology field j the Relative Patent Activity (RPA) is calculated according to:

The RXA and RLA are calculated in a similar way as the RPA, by substituting patents (p) by exports (x) and literature publications (l) respectively.

In addition to exports, which are the basis of the RXA, the RCA was also calculated in order to check the robustness of the analysis with the RXA. The RCA takes also the imports m into account and is calculated according to:

All specialization indicators are normalized between +100 and –100. Positive values indicate an above average specialization on the analyzed technology, a negative value shows that the country is more specializing on other technologies.

Sustainability technologies are neither a patent class nor a classification in the HS-2002 classification of the trade data from the UN-COMTRAD databank which can be easily detected. Thus, for each technology, it was necessary to identify the key technological concepts and segments. They were transformed into specific search concepts for the patent data and the trade data. This required an enormous amount of work and substantial engineering skills. Furthermore, there is a dual use problem of the identified segments. The data only indicates that there is a technological capability which could be used for ecological sustainability – not necessarily that these technologies are already implemented in a way that the environmental burden is reduced. Thus, in order to reflect that ambiguity, the term sustainability technology has to be interpreted as ecological sustainability relevant technology.