The productivity of national innovation systems in Europe: catching up or falling behind?The productivity of national innovation systems in Europe: catching up or falling behind? Peer-Reviewed Journal Publication Δημοσίευση σε Περιοδικό με Κριτές 2022-07-252021enThe authors thank the financial support from the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad), the State Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion) and the European Regional Development Fund (Fondo Europeo de DEsarrollo Regional) under grant PID 2019-105952 GB-I00 (AEI/FEDER, UE). Juan Aparicio recognizes the financial support from the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad), the State Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion) and the European Regional Development Fund (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional) under grant MTM 2016-79765-P (AEI/FEDER, UE). Jon Mikel Zabala-Iturriagagoitia acknowledges the financial support from the Basque Government Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture (IT 885–16).Innovation is one of the main determinants of economic development in modern societies. The extant evidence points to increasing territorial disparities in Europe concerning innovation. Relying on production theory, we examine the nature of these disparities. In particular, we are interested in finding out whether catching up processes are stronger than the shifts of the technology frontier, which would lead to a convergence of national innovation systems, or if, on the contrary, technological change is sounder than catching up, leading to increasing divergence in the performance of innovation systems. To capture these underlying dynamics, we apply the global Malmquist productivity index to the data included in the 2019 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard, which includes statistical information for the period 2011–2018. The evolution shown by the global Malmquist productivity over time demonstrates that productivity gains as a result of innovation are falling. Our results evidence that innovation activities do not necessarily imply technological improvements. Furthermore, innovation activities do not prompt follower and lagging countries to catch up with more advanced ones. The paper also explores the policy implications of the previous results.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Technovation102 Zabala-Iturriagagoitia Jon Mikel Aparicio Juan Ortiz Lidia Carayannis Elias G. Grigoroudis Evangelos Γρηγορουδης Ευαγγελος Elsevier Innovation systems Productivity European innovation scoreboard Technological change Catching up Malmquist