Measuring technological capabilities at the country level: A survey and a menu for choice

Abstract

Several new measures of national technological capabilities have recently been developed. These attempts are a result of an often-implicit theoretical consensus about the nature of technology. The aim of this article is to compare their methodologies and results. The World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Development Program (UNDP), the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), and the RAND Corporation are the institutions that have provided the measures examined here. We compare these authoritative attempts with our own measure of technological capability, ArCo. The results provide a broadly comparable ranking of countries, although a few significant differences do emerge.