"Innovation-Productivity Paradox: Implications for Regional Policy" Background paper for the OECD-EC High-Level Expert Workshop series “Productivity Policy for Places”, March 3 and 5
The notion of innovation-productivity paradox refers to the co-existence of exciting new technological innovations (e.g., artificial intelligence, digitalisation, machine learning and
robotics) and declining productivity rates in the 21st-century OECD economies. This paper explores the regional dimension of the paradox in question. It aims to distil a set
of theory-informed policy implications grounded in key ‘areas of agreement’ among three relevant kinds of research: economic research on the global productivity slowdown, innovation paradoxes research, and regional innovation studies. Overall, the paper underscores that several critical causal factors of the global productivity slowdown are very likely to be operative at the subnational level rather than solely at
the level of firms and nations; hence, the regional scale constitutes a fertile ground to design and implement place-based policies that could boost inclusive productivity
growth in the COVID-19-riddled OECD economie