Modelling the Interconnection Between Technological Leadership and the Level of Use of Information and Communication Technologies

This article presents an empirical analysis of the link between technological leadership and the use of information and communication technologies. This paper aims to formalize the factors that determine the country's potential for technological leadership. The methodological toolkit for analyzing the link between the development of information and communication technologies and the technological leadership of the country is the methods of panel regression analysis: the fixed effects model, the random effects model, the Hausman test for correlated random effects, the combined regression model with dummy variables, the Wald test and the model fixed effects with dummy variables. The information base of the research is World Bank data, data files of national accounts of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Eurostat data. The object of the study is the data of ten countries of the world (Brazil, India, China, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), the period of the study is 2008-2016 years. The indicator of innovative development of the country, which is evaluated by the number of issued patents, was used as a dependent variable. The influence of factor indicators is considered in terms of four components: entrepreneurship (the number of new enterprises founded in the country during the fiscal year), export of high-tech goods (the share of the export of high-tech goods in the total export of goods according to 2007 data), GDP per capita (in US dollars for according to 2010 data), startups (number of registered startups). According to the results of building a model with fixed effects, a positive relationship between the technological leadership of the country and the development of information and communication technologies has been proven. In addition, the results of empirical calculations prove that the share of export of high-tech goods in the total export of countries is insignificant during the analyzed period. The study proves the essential role of information and communication technologies in technological progress and empirically confirms the potential difference in profits between manufacturers and exporters of technological products.