Abstract
As the same members of East Asian NIEs, Taiwan and Korea have developed from labor intensive economy to capital intensive economy and then to technology/knowledge intensive economy in recent years. Nevertheless, there are few studies using patents to analyze the patterns of technological specialization and innovation in Taiwan and Korea. In the previous studies, the term of analysis has been limited until 1999, and they have not followed up recent trends. In this paper, we extend and aggregate the patent data of US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ti11 2003 and attempt to show the differences or similarities on the patterns of technological specialization between Taiwan and Korea. The rank of the numbers of patents of Taiwan and Korea in USPTO was 21st and 37th in 1980 respectively and jumped to 4th and 5th in 2003 respectively, becoming major technological innovators in the world. We found that their patterns on technological specialization and the degree of technological concentration are not necessarily same, and the characteristics of agents of innovation in Korea and Taiwan differ considerably, reflecting the differences in their industrial structures and national innovation systems.
