The Impact of R&D and Innovation on National Income

In this study we empirically investigate the influence of several indicators of R&D and innovation on GDP for OECD countries by utilizing an unbalanced panel for the years of 1995-2021. Two distinct measures of patent applications, two different measures of trademark applications, researchers in R&D, and technicians in R&D are the proxies for R&D and innovation. We also added inflation, productivity, investment, and education into our model as control variables. Selection between fixed effect model and random effect model is made via Hausman test. According to the estimation results, we identified statistically significant positive impact of two distinct measures of patent applications, two different measures of trademark applications, researchers in R&D, and technicians in R&D variables on gross domestic product for the sample of OECD countries during the period of 1995-2021. Regarding the control variables, whenever they are statistically significant then we observed positive coefficient estimations for the variables of productivity, investment, and education and negative coefficient estimation for the variable of inflation.