In modern growth or development
theory innovation is a crucial
factor which pushes the dynamics of an economy and determines its
success in
the future. Out of innovations, created in the presence, the potentials
for the
future of a country are prepared, deciding how its economic fitness and
competitiveness will emerge. So, future-orientation is in a natural way
connected with innovativeness of a firm, a region or a country and
shapes the
strength and the specifics of the process of development.
Looking around the
world economy, one can observe a variety of countries which exist at
different
levels of development. Each of them has to master its economic future,
choosing
an own specific development strategy. How the various countries,
belonging to
different continents and cultures, will succeed in this endeavor is
surely one
of the most exciting and important issues of coming decades.
In this global
context our study is focusing on “future
preparedness” of a specific group of
countries, the so called OECD- countries. The origin of this group
dates back
to 1960, when 18 European countries and the United States as well as
Canada
created in Paris an organization dedicated to global development. Today
the
group consists of 34 member countries which span the globe from North
to South
America, to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. They include many of
the world’s
most advanced countries but also emerging ones like Mexico, Chile and
Turkey.
The
concept of “future preparedness” gets its
analytical and empirical relevance when
it is placed and investigated within a specific development model. Such
a model
determines the theoretical basis of the study and provides the
necessary ingredients
for an empirical application.
In our study we will use “Comprehensive
Neo-Schumpeterian Economics” (CNSE) as an analytical
framework (Hanusch and
Pyka, 2007). This approach is based (a) 2 on the notion of
future-orientation
penetrating all spheres of socio-economic life in developed as well as
in
developing countries; (b) on the principle of innovation as the main
driving
force and the engine of future-orientation and development.
Based on the
concept of CNSE the central aim of our study is to gain new insights
and findings
concerning the “future preparedness” of the
OECD-countries. To meet this target
we (a) rely on the notion of “future-orientation”
as a basic prerequisite for
being prepared to master the future; (b) try to bring this concept of
“future preparedness”
on a concrete basis by using indicator analysis embedded in the
framework of
CNSE; (c) investigate patterns of similarities in the set of
indicators; (d) show
how these patterns look like by applying cluster analysis; (e) draw
some
conclusions from the patterns concerning the status and variety of
future-orientation in the group of OECD-countries.
Future-orientation will be described
and characterized in total by 45 indicators, focusing on the real (16),
the public
(21) and the financial sector (08) of an economy. The indicators
reflect many
different activities in the various countries related to innovation and
the “emerging
future” within the concept of CNSE. Dependent on data
availability, the
indicator sets comprise different years mainly in the period between
2006 and
2012.
JEL: N10, P00, O10