A cross-country comparison of the effects of institutions on internationally oriented innovation

In this paper, we probe the relationship between institutions and internationally oriented innovation. For the first time, we use Patent Cooperation Treaty statistics as a new source of national-level data on the inventive activities of internationally oriented innovators, which we refer to as “global innovators.” One third of global innovators are small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We apply these new data and investigate the effects of corruption and business climate on patenting activity. It is ascertained herein that the inventive activity of global innovators has a linear relationship with institutional factors, while there is no observed relationship between the quality of the institutional environment and PCT patenting by multinational enterprises (MNEs).