Fostering innovation through governance systems: empirical insights from South Asian countries

Purpose Innovation is necessary to ensure consistent economic growth and to meet the global competition. In view of this, the purpose of this study to check the effect of governance quality as a tool for fostering innovation performance. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis was arranged on 20 year’s (2000–2019) data from South Asian economies. Subject to the existence of cointegration, the authors use the fully modified ordinary least square model for regression analysis and check the robustness through robust least square model. Findings The empirical findings infer that all dimensions of governance have a positive significant impact on both research and development expenditures and trademark applications jointly known as innovation performance. In addition, the empirical analysis discloses the positive effect of all control variables, including FDI inflow, banking sector development, economic growth, ease of doing business index and government subsidies on innovation activities. The analysis confirms the “grease the wheel” role of governance in fostering innovation. Practical implications It is apparently recommended to strengthen the exercise of better governance to harvest better innovation scores. Originality/value This study advocates the positive role of individual dimensions of governance recommended by existing literature and complements the literature by jointly exploring the impact of all governance dimensions on overall innovation performance.