Understanding the determinants of social innovation in Europe: an econometric approach

ABSTRACT

The objective of the paper is to understand the various determinants of social innovation incidence at the macroeconomic level across countries in Europe. Using a multivariate regression framework, the paper analyses the role of various characteristics from the ecosystem in which social innovations occur. In particular, the paper quantifies the relative importance of several factors, such as educational attainment, ease of doing business index, corruption index, risk preferences, cultural and social norms, to name a few. Methodologically, the paper takes into account the evolution of macroeconomic circumstances, such as the economic crisis of 2008 or general time trend, by collecting a panel data of various indicators from different data sources across countries and over time. As part of robustness checks, the paper uses three different measures of social innovation and includes country fixed effects to account for heterogeneities across countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation
• Europe
• cross-country study
• panel data methods

JEL codes:

• C13
• O31
• O35
• O52

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a number of social innovation examples with description in Europe, see SIMPACT project’s website: http://www.simpact-project.eu/evidence/sicases/index.htm

2 We acknowledge that often times social innovation is a local or regional phenomenon; however, data availability is even more difficult to achieve at a more disaggregate level in the context of social innovation, hence limiting the analysis to the macro-level.

3 For an overview of empirical approaches within FP7 research projects see, for example, Pelka and Tertriep (2015). Mapping Social Innovation Maps: The State of Research Practice across Europe.

4 Due to the small sample size, adding time trend is preferred to adding year effects in the models, for the latter increases the number of parameters to estimate.

5 Please note that as there has not been an empirical analysis on social innovation as done here, it is not possible to relate the choice of variables to existing literature on social innovation.

6 Directorate General for Internal Policies, Social Economy, Policy Department A: Economic and Scientific Policy (2016). For access to documentation, see http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/578969/IPOL_STU(2016)578969_EN.pdf

7 For more details, see the relevant documentation on social protection statistics on the Eurostat website: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Social_protection_statistics

8 Ideally, one would use data on the number of volunteers to check its impact on social innovation. However, such data is not publicly available.