Chapter 13: Innovation or Imitation: The Right Key to Growth in Poland

This chapter deals with the issue of the role of imitation and innovation in explaining economic growth in the context of the Polish economy, taking the endogenous growth theory and the technology catch-up theory as guidelines. This issue is extremely important as Poland faces the urgent need to reduce productivity gap through investments in R&D and/or the absorption of foreign technologies.

The aim of this chapter is to find the effects of innovation and imitation on economic performance of Poland and shed light on possible outcome differences between these two kinds of activities.

The empirical analysis uses data on innovation, imitation and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Polish economy between 2005 and 2021, collected from a few statistical sources. We apply the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to find the impact of innovation and imitation on economic growth.

The results suggest that R&D investments positively affect economic performance of the Polish economy, whereas the impact of imitation activities on GDP appears to be insignificant.