A longitudinal overview of the European national innovation systems through the lenses of the Community Innovation Survey

In this paper, we perform a detailed longitudinal analysis on the innovation performance in nine European countries by using data stemming from the Community Innovation Survey. The temporal dimension of our dataset includes the period during the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the period after the crisis. As such, it allows us to fully evaluate the changes in the innovation processes within the countries during and after the crisis. Our findings suggest that there are no significant differences between the countries in the determinants for firms which decide to enter the innovation process. However, the effect of innovation output over labor productivity varies between economies: there is a positive relationship in the more developed economies compared to a negative or neutral relationship in the less developed. We use these results to speculate that the national innovation system in developing economies becomes more vulnerable in periods of financial crises.