National Intellectual Capital: A Comparison of 40 Countries.

• Author: Pope, C.T.
• Position: Further Reading - Book review

NATIONAL INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL: A COMPARISON OF 40 COUNTRIES

Carol Yeh-Yun Lin and Leif Edvinsson

(New York: Springer, 2011), 300 pages.

Questions of how to value the intangible--whether the intellectual capacity of a nation's populace, the ease of doing business in a country or investments in research and development--have vexed policymakers and corporate leaders. The corporate world has addressed this problem through the introduction of "intellectual capital," which serves as a metric for a company's non-financial resources. Why, then, is it still quite difficult to value the intellectual capital of a nation?

National Intellectual Capital: A Comparison of 40 Countries seeks to answer this question. Covering fourteen years of data drawn from a multitude of sources, Carol Yeh-Yun Lin and Leif Edvinsson have produced an ambitious text that compares and evaluates the national intellectual capital (IC) of forty of the world's most complex national economies.

Part research paper and part policy brief, the work sets out to define a solid model for measuring national IC and to test that model in a retrospective and prospective manner. The work examines issues such as whether the 2010 banking breakdown in Iceland could have been predicted by a drop in IC; if the 2010...