That isn't surprising. There are many more US patents for Asian innovators to cite from than there are Asian ones, as Hu said in a recent paper cowritten with Milan Brahmbhatt, lead economist for Asia-Pacific at the World Bank.
KNOWLEDGE HUBS
Remove that difference from the equation, and the picture begins to look brighter, especially for South Korea and Taiwan, two of the most technologically advanced countries in Asia outside Japan.
Increasingly the building blocks of South Korean or Taiwanese scientists -- the "prior art" in patenting lingo -- are coming from within their own country or from other Asian nations.
"After controlling for the fact that the potential pool of citable electrical and electronics patents is much smaller than the potential pool in the US, [South] Korean patents cite other [South]Korean patents almost five times as intensively as they do US patents," Brahmbhatt and Hu note.
To a lesser extent, the same is true of Taiwan. Apart from building on the technologies developed by their compatriots, researchers in Taiwan are also making three times more use of South Korean inventions than they are of US patents.
"These trends confirm the growing regional dimension in East Asian knowledge flows," the economists say.
The emergence of local knowledge clusters is crucial for Asia. They will lead to specialization and improve the odds of big-bang innovation, which, in Schumpeter's scheme of things, is the biggest tool any entrepreneur can lay his hands on to "creatively destruct" existing hegemonies.
Until that happens, prosperity in Asia will be subservient to Western demand. And that automatically means that another prerequisite for a decoupled economy -- freedom in setting fiscal and monetary policies -- won't be available to Asian policy makers for many years to come.
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