Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/328832 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Citation: 
[Journal:] Economies [ISSN:] 2227-7099 [Volume:] 11 [Issue:] 8 [Article No.:] 207 [Year:] 2023 [Pages:] 1-24
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
We study whether remote sensing (RS), a set of technologies with global reach and a variety of applications, can be considered instrumental to the provision of global public goods (GPG). We exploit text information from patent data and apply structural topic modeling to identify topics related (or relevant) to GPG provision, and trace their participation in the evolution of remote sensing technology over time. We develop a new indicator of affinity to GPG (and other themes) using meta information from our dataset. We find that, first, RS displays features of a general-purpose technology. Second, while peripheral, GPG-relevant topics are present in the RS topic space, and in some cases overlap with topics with high affinity in AI and participation of public sector actors in invention. With our analysis, we contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of technology and (global) political economy, a field of research yet under-explored.
Subjects: 
global public goods
patents
remote sensing
structural topic modeling
text as data
unsupervised ML
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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