An Empirical Perspective on the Relationship Between Innovation Performance and Sustainable Development

In 2015, almost all member states of the United Nations adopted seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide specific objectives and timelines to promote inclusive prosperity. Innovation is crucial for achieving sustainable development. Innovation itself is one of the SDGs (Goal 9) and also a means for achieving the others. It is aimed to reveal the multidimensional relationship of innovation with the pillars of sustainable development in this study. The dataset of the study consists of 35 OECD member countries and statistics of these countries between 2007-2019 years. Global innovation scores of countries were used for innovation. Human Development Index was used for the social dimension, CO2 emission values were used for the environmental dimension and GDP per capita was used for the economic dimension. The balanced panel was resolved through Eviews and STATA software packages programs. According to the results of the analysis, innovation has a positive and significant relationship with the social and economic pillars of sustainable development. It also has a significant but negative relationship with CO2 emission, which negative relationship is a positive situation for the environment. Therefore, the main result of the study is innovation has a positive effect on sustainable development. According to the causality test results, it was determined that there are both short and long-run relationships between the three dimensions of innovation and sustainable development.