Methodological Dichotomy in the Studies of Knowledge Spillovers: CEE Region Under Focus

The recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to solve the puzzle around knowledge capital and externalities it appears to unfold. Clearly, the concept of prompting growth through acquiring knowledge for free is appealing. Still, there is no consensus on the significance and magnitude of the estimated impacts of knowledge externalities. The ambiguity might be caused by the lack of methodological unity. A large cohort of scientists advocate capturing knowledge spillovers alongside the movements of production or production factors—considered as channels of knowledge transfers—while others see true value of transferred knowledge in productivity increases registered at proximity to some knowledge production. In the latter case, distance matters more than mere transfer of a product and thus the approach might be quoted as spatial. In this chapter, we discuss major contributions to the field of knowledge spillover studies made while taken both approaches, point to some advantages and pitfalls attached, and address some directions how to steer the research of knowledge spillovers further.