• France
• Italy
• OECD
• Europe
• Data Envelope Analysis
• DEA
• taxonomy
• United Kingdom
• Pavitt
• Germany
• Andrea Bonaceto
• Giovanni Dosi
• Riccardo Cambini

The aim of this work is to sketch the technological development in Italy, in the United Kingdom, in France and in Germany using Pavitt’s Taxonomy. After a first theoretical explanation of the nature of technology and of the international and intersectoral differences among the above mentioned countries, we analyse Pavitt’s Taxonomy in detail, performing an empirical analysis. The period we are interested in is from 1989 to 2006 and the main analyzed indexes are the Revealed Technological Advantage (RTA), the Revealed Export Advantage (RXA) and the Number of Patents per worker (PN). Furthermore in the last two chapters we use
Data Envelopment Analysis following two different approaches: the first one evaluates how efficiently patents per capita, investments per capita and added value per capita are transformed by Pavitt’s Taxonomy sectors into export per capita, whereas the second one considers patents per capita and investments per capita as inputs and added value per capita only as an output. All these variables represent proxies for technological development.