NANOTECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP OF COUNTRIES IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Abstract

The article updates the issues of nanotechnological leadership of countries and proves that in the last two decades nanotechnologies have turned into an established material core of building a qualitatively new economic system in the world economy, based on deep and close interactions between all participants in innovation processes. It has been established that a similar role of nanotechnology in the global innovation progress is among the priority tasks of the national governments of states that claim scientific and technological leadership, scaling up and diversifying the current toolset of state stimulation of the nanotechnology sectors of their economies. It is obvious that nanotechnology represents an innovation that can provide completely new and, in many cases, unique properties. This will manifest itself in radical changes in the scientific and technological potential of national economies and their competitiveness in various segments of the global market. It was established that, as of now, more than sixty countries of the world are actively implementing special programs of state support for national nanotechnology industries into national economic practice, primarily on the basis of the constant increase in the amount of state capital investments in this sector. It was revealed that over the past two decades, the USA has seen a steady increase in investments both in fundamental nanotechnological research, capable of providing fundamentally new innovative discoveries, and in applied R&D designed for the market promotion of nanotechnologies and their inclusion in international economic circulation. It has been proven that despite the enormous efforts of the united Europe in the development of the nanotechnology sector of the regional economy, it has not been able to achieve global leadership in this field. The main reasons for the significant lag behind the EU in the nanotechnological sphere lie primarily in the significantly lower support for nanotechnological developments from business structures compared to the same USA, the weakly expressed scientific and technological specialization of the European Union according to the direction of global innovation progress, as well as a certain "dispersion" scientific efforts of this block on various vectors of nanoindustry development.