Country size and technology innovation: a comparative study of countries based on different levels of economic development

By using the panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model and panel data of 40 countries from 2001 to 2016, this paper empirically studies the influence of country size on technology innovation of developing and developed countries from three dimensions: population size, market size and trade size. The research shows that under the conditions of different development levels, country size plays a huge role in technology innovation. Among them, for the developed countries, the market size plays an important role in promoting their technology innovation, followed by the trade size. For the developing countries, the trade size is the key factor for the promotion of their technology innovation. The market size has little effect and the population size has a negative impact. On this basis, this paper puts forward some suggestions for the large developing countries to promote technology innovation based on the country size.