The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 36 No. 2 1954
The Level of Inventive Activity
Abstract
Forty-six years ago when various social theories, pregnant with nineteenth century optimism, postulated a continuous increase in the rate of discovery and invention, a Swedish scholar noted that the annual number of patents issued by the principal industrial countries showed signs of leveling off.3 This retardation contrasted sharply with the rapid increase in patenting characteristic of the nineteenth century. Subsequent investigation disclosed that the number of patents issued per capita tended to level off and perhaps to decline for every nation after it had passed through the rapid industrialization phase.4 Whether the retardation in patenting reflected a genuine stabilization or diminution in the per capita rate of invention or merely in the proportion of invention which is patented is therefore a question which has perplexed social and physical scientists for some time.5 The issues raised by this trend in patenting in the western world are not merely academic, for if the possibilities enumerated by Kuznets many years ago are indeed correct, and patent statistics (for the period under review) reflect either inventive activity, changes in technical knowledge, or technical change,6 then the retardation in statistics of patents issued means that the growth rate of one or another of these fundamental phenomena has been declining. True, no retardation in the rate of technical change has appeared in other, more reliable indexes, such as output per unit of input, but the possibility exists that the data reflect a decline in
- DOI
- 10.2307/1924669
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 183
- Sources
- openalex crossref