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Title: The national German innovation system: its development in different governmental and territorial structures- [World Wide Web]

Notes: Germany was united as it now is already from 1871 to 1945. It existed as a large array of individual states before that period and was divided into West and East from the Second World War to 1990, with extremely different innovation policies. Since then it was reunited again. Nevertheless, there are many indications of a national innovation system through all these periods, government structures and territorial changes. The contribution provides several long time series with respective innovation indicators bridging more than 100 years of economic history. It was possibly to collect science and research expenditures from national and regional governments in a comparable way. Statistics on research output, i.e. publication statistics, proved to be more difficult to reconstruct and is available only from 1900 upwards. The most powerful tool to analyse innovations systems in historical perspectives are patent statistics which are available since 1812 and offer various disaggregation possibilities. The resulting long time series include data for the German Democratic Republic if various specificities of the communist country are observed (non-convertability of its currency, collectivistic patent law, publication output oriented towards the countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA). The ups and downs are analysed, put into perspectives and compared to important events in the global system. The explanation for the pertinence of a national innovation system seems to rest more in educational, cultural and language traditions than in government and territorial coverage. The contribution is divided into an analysis of the national level and two sectorallong-term studies on electrical engineering and chemistry. Thereby, the path dependence of technological paradigms within such a national innovation system becomes obvious. The clearest path dependance is found in chemistry, but not in electrical engineering. Because of severe problems with war times and hyperinflation, it has proved to be very difficult to arrive at long pecuniary time series. In the ongoing analysis, therefore, a full scale assessment of the impact of innovation activities on economic growth has not yet been achieved. So far, an aggregate production function for Germany after World War II is estimated. In contrast to most other empirical studies, technical progress is not approximated by a linear time trend but it is distinguished between technical progress which is a result of own R&D activities, and the import of technological know-how through licence agreements, approximated by the indicator variables stock of patents and real expenditures for licences. In addition, technology diffusion, as approximated by the stock of effective technical standards, is integrated in the long-term production function. The superior long-term production function, including the usual production factors capital and labour as well as the three indicator variables mentioned above, is then used to assess the effects of the different sources of innovation as well as technology diffusion on economic growth from 1961 unti11996. Altogether, the results suggest that the sources of technical progress considered here as well as the diffusion of technology contribute substantially to economic growth in Germany. By using the new data base much better econometric estimations are possible. A concise picture of the extent and the changes of innovation activity in the past more than 100 years in Germany is available now. This means, the empirical base for investigations of innovation or economic history has much improved so that a strong ""empirical gap"" is no more the case. Nevertheless, it is true that many questions brought up by evolutionary theory cannot be solved empirically in the moment. But at the same time the opposite is true: while the application of structure checking methods is standard in economics, there is now a number of structure revealing observations on innovation history which are not modelled by theoretical relationships so far. These observations may be taken up from the side of theory and made fruitful for the further development of our theoretical understanding of economic development.

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