Innovation Determinants in Emerging Countries: An Empirical Study at the Tunisian Firms level

Abstract

Explaining why some firms innovate and some others do not is an out-of-date challenge in the economic literature. In developing countries context, such exercise is even more complicated by the nature of the innovation (incremental, occasional and rarely continuous and structured). In this paper, an exploratory tentative logistic regression is presented based on an Innovation survey on Tunisian firms. With regard to the results on the two "traditional" determinants of innovation which are the size of firms and the market structure, the main findings of this work are the following: econometric estimations have put forward the existence of an inverted "U" type relationship between decision to innovate and these two variables. On the other hand, it seems that neither skills of workers nor public incentives were significant to explain the innovation behaviour of Tunisian firms