THE IMPACT OF THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY INDICATORS ON REGIONAL ECONOMIC GROWTH: EVIDENCE FROM KAZAKHSTAN

This paper presents an evaluation of the efficient role of knowledge based components, including effectiveness of government program, knowledge creation, information and communication technologies (ICT) and R&D and innovation factors in motivating economic growth of developing emerging economies, particularly in the Republic of Kazakhstan. For this purpose, a panel regression model is used to analyze the data collected from the Statistics Committee of the Ministry of National Economy during the years 2007-2017. The results extracted from an econometric model selected such factors as initial R&D expenses, number of organizations (enterprises) engaged in R&D and percentage of obtained patents and articles with impact factor per researcher get the impact to the economic growth of country. Furthermore, the study investigates efficiency of selected knowledge-intensive factors using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based on CCR model, which showed that R&D expenses among of the regions of Kazakhstan is not equable and efficiency of other indicators like science and knowledge workers, knowledge creation and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is low.