MEASURING THE TECHNOLOGY ACHIEVEMENT INDEX: COMPARISON AND RANKING OF COUNTRIES

Year 2017, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 164 - 176, 30.06.2017

Ahmet Incekara , Gulden Sengun , Tugba Guz

https://doi.org/10.17261/Pressacademia.2017.446

Abstract

Purpose- Countries that can adapt to the pace of technological
developments, follow and use this speed have a stronger economy and obtain a
significant competitive advantage in the global arena. Therefore, the countries
make various regulations to increase the technological achievements, access to
the global technologies, adapt to the rapid technological transformation and
organize their sub-structures according to these technologies. Technology
Achievement Index (TAI), which is one of the studies to evaluate the
technological performance of countries, classifies countries according to their
technological achievements.

Methodology- In this study, TAI-16 of 105 countries is
calculated by using the
methodology based on the original study of Desai et al. TAI that originally
proposed in 2002 by Desai et al. is a unified index that revealing countries'
technological abilities and performance in terms of technology capacity,
diffusion of new technologies, diffusion of old innovations and development of
human skills. TAI which consists of four main dimensions and eight
sub-indicators of the dimensions calculate the average of the dimensions of the
index based on the selected indicators. Each of four dimensions includes two
sub-indicators.

Findings- In
this study, technological capabilities and performances of 105 countries were
analyzed and Technology Achievement Index (TAI-16) was calculated using most of
the data of 2015. Moreover, TAI-16 values of the 105 countries were classified
as Leaders (TAI > 0,5), Potential Leaders (TAI = 0,35-0,49), Dynamic
Adopters (TAI = 0,20-0,34), and Marginalized (TAI ˂ 0,20) following the
methodology in TAI-02. Conclusion- According to TAI-16 classification,
the countries were identified as follows; 40 countries as Leaders, 38 countries
as Potential Leaders, 17 countries as Dynamic Adopters, and 10 countries as
Marginalized. Furthermore, TAI ranking of the 105 countries was created. In
this classification, while Switzerland had the highest with 0.813 TAI value,
Ethiopia had the lowest value with 0,028 TAI value.

Keywords

Human skills, technology achievement ındex, technology creation, technology development, technology diffusion

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