Innovationer och dess inverkan av Humankapital, Handel och FoU : Till vilken grad påverkas innovationer i EU av Humankapital, Handel med IKT och FoU?

Sammanfattning: This thesis analyzes what effects human capital, R&D and ICT-goods trade have on innovation. Positive outcomes from innovation are an increased level of productivity, which increases incentives for greater innovative activity. Throughout this thesis patent-applications will be used as a proxy for innovation, which is in accordance with previous literature. The main scope of this paper will focus on econometric panel-data to determine which indicators have a significant effect on national-wide patent-applications and basic policy making in accordance with the findings. The scope of the study will include 27 European Union countries. The methodology used concerning panel-data is fixed effects. However, due to the amount of missing data the econometric estimation, we will focus on imputation of the missing values. According to various tests that determine what kind of model fits the underlying dataset, we can conclude that this study requires the use of a Multiple Imputation technique. Our result shows that investments towards R&D have the biggest impact on innovations.