The impact of patents and standards on macroeconomic growth: A panel approach covering four countries and 12 sectors

Based on the assumption that codified technological know-how contributes to economic growth, this paper presents the estimation of a Cobb-Douglas production function, pooling data over four European countries and twelve sectors. The empirical results confirm that both the stock of patents and the stock of technical Standards contribute significantly to economic growth in the 1990. Whereas the results of the country models are rather similar, we observe significant differences between the sector models, which indicate that Standards are more im-portant for growth in mature industries and patents in more dynamic industries.