Outline

Diversification is highly cited as a driver of economic growth. Either when referring to technologies or products, scholars have already demonstrated that increasing diversification have led countries to higher development. Lately, diversification studies have modeled economies based on complex system approaches that have allowed testing whether current countries' portfolios have determined the rise of new industries. Researchers have focused on reviewing and visually representing how products are related to each other by means of statistical co-occurrence. Such relationships have evolved over time under the assumption that when a country is globally relevant manufacturing two products, those two products respond to common scientific and technological capacities (Hidalgo et al, 2007; Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009). Thus far, the study of diversification has been extended beyond the issue of products and country-level distribution, including reviewing spatial and temporal dynamics of the diversification of scientific and technological capacities (Frenken et al. 2007, Neffke et al. 2011, Essletzbichler, 2015, Boschma et al, 2015).

Nevertheless, those studies have been constrained to explore the effect that either current endogenous scientific, technological or industrial competences may have on rising new scientific, technological or industrial competences, respectively. There is no cross-study regarding the effect that scientific competences may have on rising new technological or industrial competences. We address such gap by modeling countries regarding their scientific competences and technological portfolios by applying economic complexity methodological tools to test the effect that endogenous scientific capacities may have on rising new technological competences. Our databases regard publications -scientific competences, 23.770.813 records, 252 scientific areas- and patenting -technological competences, 1.545.477 records, 655 patent classes- data covering 195 countries during the 1988-2015 period. Our hypothesis is that for those countries whose scientific competences are more closely related to new-to-the-country technologies the likelihood of technological diversification is higher. In addition, the analysis explores the influence economic development may have on technological diversification thereby testing the hypothesis that earlier stages of development are associated with higher likelihood of technological diversification regarding the effect of scientific endogenous competences. We expect to show that both hypotheses are true that is the close a new-to-the-country technology is to the current endogenous scientific competences, the greater the likelihood of technological diversification at country level, and that such effect is stronger in earlier phases of development.