Politics has taken center stage of late, giving the nation’s top economists plenty to blog about.
The titillating headline on the recent Capital Gains and Games blog post by Pete Davis is...
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The United States has always prized its place as the world's leading innovator, but that Number One ranking is at risk. Last year, for the first time ever, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued more patents to foreigners than to Americans. And many observers expect the gap to widen.
The change has come about mainly due to a dramatic uptick in patents for Japanese, Chinese and South Korean inventors, while those received by Americans declined for the second consecutive year. Non-American patents have surged nearly 30 percent since 1998, rising 4.5 percent to 93,244 in 2008 (in the U.S., inventors received 92,000 patents). Japanese inventors received 36,679 patents, Germans 10,086 and South Koreans 8,731.