Comparative Evaluation of the Intellectual Capital dissemination Efficiency of Belgium And Sweden

Abstract

Creating intellectual capital and a sustained competitive advantage is a key objective of most member states in the European Union. Multiple efforts have been put in place to harness the power of the internal inputs employed to achieve this, however, Belgium has consistently been lagging at the lower spectrum of intellectual capital generation among the European Union member states whilst Sweden currently stands as the one with the best innovative performance. Hence, using Panel data from the European Innovation Scoreboard (2011-2019) for Belgium and Sweden, this paper employed a two-stage DEA analysis (Hybrid Distance) to assess the efficiency of the use of financial injections in transforming into a sustained creation and dissemination of intellectual capital. Findings show that even though there has been steady improvement in efficiency in Belgium for past couple of years, the years of 2016-2018 were found to be relatively more efficient when compared to the preceding years. However, when the results were benchmarked against Sweden, the most innovative member state as of 2018, Belgium was still surprisingly found to be relatively efficient in the years of 2016-2018 prompting insightful learnings from between both countries. Recommendations were provided based on results of input redundancy and output deficiency computations as well as suitable policy implications to avert this gap.