Conceptualizing and measuring the transition to the knowledge economy in advanced capitalist democracies

Following the profound socioeconomic transformations that took place in advanced political economies during the last three decades, the knowledge economy has become a central area of study in comparative and international political economy. Despite its growing popularity, however, the literature does not provide clear conceptualisation and operationalization. The aim of this paper is to provide a more nuanced, theoretically driven indicator of the knowledge economy. To do so, in a first step, we map the concept of ‘knowledge’ in the social sciences from early political-economic writings to recent studies in economics, organisational studies and political economy and highlight three recurrent dimensions that we consider constitutive of the knowledge economy: tangible knowledge capital, intangible knowledge capital, and human capital. In a second step, we collect longitudinal data from the EU KLEMS, International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and Labour Force Survey (LFS) on a range of indicators relating to these three dimensions. We then construct an index of the knowledge economy that allows to capture the complementarity and co-evolution of technology and skills across sectors and countries between the mid-1990s and early-2020s. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for current CPE research on the transition to the knowledge economy.