Country innovative development: impact of the shadow economy

Abstract

This article generalizes arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion regarding the determination of the influence of illegal economic activity and expansion of the shadow economy on innovative country development. The systematization of the scientific works on the above problems proves that there is no one no complexity and unity in the above-mentioned scientific findings, which, in turn, demonstrates the necessity of further theoretical and empirical search in this sphere. Thus, it was developed a scientific hypothesis about the negative influence of the shadow economy on innovative country development. In order to test this hypothesis it was developed a scientific and methodological approach that consists of several stages: 1) correlation analysis in order to eliminate multicollinearity problem between control variables; 2) analysis of dataset descriptive statistics; 3) running Hausman test in order to clarify specification of the regression model (fixed or random effects model); 4) realization of the panel data regression analysis for the whole country sample and separately for Ukraine, characteristics of its results. Technically all stages of the research are realized with the help of Stata 12/S.E. software. The country sample consists of 9 countries (Azerbaijan, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, and Ukraine). Time horizon – 2008-2018. Running of the panel data regression analysis (model specification – with fixed effects) allow confirming research hypothesis for the whole country sample (an increase of shadow economy negatively affected innovative country development: an increase of shadow economy to GDP ratio in 1 % leads to the decrease of the Global Innovation Index in 0.5 points). However, it was not proved for Ukraine separately. It leads to the conclusion that innovative development in Ukraine does not highly dependent on the shadow economy scale because of more significant obstacles on the way to innovation adoption (institutional inefficiency, regulatory drawbacks, etc.). Keywords: innovative economic growth, innovative state management, panel data analysis, shadow economy.