Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

Fig. 1-22: Percentage of graduates in the tertiary sector in STEM and ICT courses of study, 2017
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
DEU
AU
T
CZ
E
ES
P
FIN
SV
K
LT
U
ES
T
SW
E
GBR
FR
A
Ø E
U-2
8
GRC
HU
N
ITA
POL
SV
N
BE
L
PR
T
LV
A
LU
X
DN
K
NL
D
CH
E
US
A
AU
S
EU Member States
Reference countries
in
%
* Country data not available for the reference year: IRL, CYP, HRV, MLT, ROU, BGR, BRA, CHN, ZAF, CAN.
Source: OECD (2019b). Graphic: iit. 

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50
Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
Additional data from the same OECD source on 
the 25- to 34-year-old age group (40% of tertiary ed-
ucation graduates) also indicate that the percentage 
of graduates with tertiary-level degrees will keep on 
rising.
Complexity capital 
Innovation research shows that, in addition to the 
size of its human capital, the intensity and the diver-
sity of a country’s useful knowledge is key to its in-
novation capability. The iit Innovation Capability In-
dicator calls this heterogeneity of knowledge “com-
plexity capital”. It is calculated using the Economic 
Complexity Index
53
developed by scientists from MIT 
and Harvard University.
This index reflects how various economies spe-
cialise in terms of their goods exports in the com-
53 See The Growth Lab at Harvard University (2019).
plex products segment. In other words, an economy 
will be deemed economically complex if a high per-
centage of its total export volume is made up in par-
ticular by the kind of complex products that hardly 
any other country can make. If a country only ex-
ports products that (many) other countries export as 
well, its economic complexity rating will fall. Eco-
nomic complexity can thus also be interpreted as 
the ability to create new products and place them 
on the global market. In this sense, the indicator 
measures a country’s capability to innovate (innova-
tive products) as well as its competitiveness (plac-
ing innovative products on the global market for a 
competitive price). The index is standardised and 
ranges from -2.5 to +2.5. 
Fig. 1-24 shows Austria’s position in international 
comparisons based on the most recently available