Innovationen und soziale Sicherung im internationalen Vergleich.

The relationship between innovations and social security is crucial for the future of the knowledge society. If social security systems should prove to be an impediment to innovation this could lead to an erosion of social security systems; innovations and social security would be incompatible. Otherwise, if social security buffer the social risks of innovations and thus facilitate their implementation, then we should expect stable patterns of social security. The relative explanatory power of the incompatibility and compensation hypotheses is discussed on the basis of internationally comparable macro data for the 80s and 90s. The compensation hypothesis predicts correctly the correlation between public social security and research expenditure. The negative relationship between social security expenditure and patent applications to the European patent office partially confirms the incompatibility hypothesis. There is therefore no reason for political fatalism: Social state security in a global knowledge economy is not a locational disadvantage per se, nor is it an advantage, per se. The fate of social security probably depends on how successfully the different countries manage to walk the tightrope between lower innovation incentives and the higher preparedness to take risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]