Analysis of Global Innovation Index by structural qualitative association

The Global Innovation Index (GII) is a popular index for measuring country's innovation competitiveness. Hence, this study intends to analyze the whole relationships of the GII. The GII structure consists of multiple layers of variables. In a research structure, when there are more variables and more layers, the number of relationships can grow very huge. This study uses both fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis and structural qualitative association as the research methods and proposes a systematic approach to screen out the insignificant re-lationships. This study uses GII 2020 as the data and concludes two relationships for Positive GII and two for Negative GII. When all antecedents but Market Sophistication are Positive, the GII tends to be Positive. On the other hand, when all antecedents but Market Sophistication are Negative, the GII tends to be Negative. This study then provides new ranking of the countries based on the empirical results. Though the new ranking for a specific country may be different from the original one, the top countries in the original ranking remain on the top on the new ranking and the bottom countries remain in the bottom.