Measuring national innovation systems efficiency – a review of DEA approach

The paper reviews the application of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method for measuring the efficiency of national innovation systems (NIS). The paper firstly visualizes the logic of DEA method and briefly summarizes the key advantages and main limitations of the DEA method. Further, this paper provides a comprehensive review of 11 empirical studies on cross-country analysis of NIS efficiency with DEA technique. In its main part the paper analyses the specifications of DEA models used in the reviewed studies, the content of the country samples, sets of input and output variables used and the resulting lists of efficient countries. The review detects general trends and differences in the sets of variables and the content of country samples. Moreover, this paper highlights the problem of “small countries bias” in the reviewed studies: situation when “small” (in terms of national innovation system scope and the level of development) countries (like Venezuela, Kyrgyzstan etc.) are included in the country sample, these “small” countries become the efficient ones. In general, empirical studies on cross-country analysis of national innovation systems efficiency using DEA method pay little attention to profound analysis of previous relevant studies. Therefore, this paper is among the first papers with deep review of such empirical studies