Reviewing how the notion has evolved in political economy and neighbouring disciplines, the paper argues that a definition of the knowledge economy should be based upon two basic elements: technology and skills.
This paper sets out to achieve two objectives: (i) to provide a theoretically-informed conceptualisation of the knowledge economy and (ii) to propose a measure of the knowledge economy that reflects such conceptualisation. Reviewing how the notion has evolved in political economy and neighbouring disciplines, the paper argues that a definition of the knowledge economy should be based upon two basic elements: technology and skills. These two elements are subsequently operationalised in six indicators, which are combined through Bayesian latent variable analysis to produce a new Knowledge Economy Index, covering 19 countries between 1995 and 2020. The paper then looks descriptively at the index to chart the rise of the knowledge economy and explore how it has differed across the advanced democracies, before using a principal component analysis to investigate whether countries cluster together into distinct ‘types’ of knowledge economies. The index presented in the paper may be usefully employed as dependent or independent variable for comparative political economists and scholars in neighbouring disciplines who are interested in researching the causes and consequences of the transition to the knowledge economy in advanced democracies.
David Hope is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy in the King’s College London Department of Political Economy. He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics (杏吧论坛) International Inequalities Institute (III). Prior to joining King’s, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the 杏吧论坛 International Inequalities Institute. David holds a PhD (2017) in Political Science from the 杏吧论坛 Department of Government and has previously studied Economics at both the 杏吧论坛 (MSc) and University College London (BSc).
Toon Van Overbeke is Assistant Professor of Europe, Climate and Digital Society at Maastricht University and Visiting Fellow at 杏吧论坛 European Institute.