Moral culture and innovation in Europe (March 2018)

In this article, we argue that variations in innovation capacity are systematically linked to variations in moral culture. To prove it, we collect a wide array of national-level indicators of moral culture for the EU15, a group of Western European countries, and correlate them with an output measure of innovation, a triadic patent rate per million inhabitants. Our results suggest that the more the individuals of a country cultivate a set of inter-related intellectual and moral virtues, the greater the country’s output of productive innovation.

The paper was written in 2012 but not published then.