The relationship of patenting applications and expenditure with output and real GDP in nineteenth century colonial New Zealand

The relationship between patenting and output series and real GDP is examined using both nineteenth century New Zealand patent applications, and applications weighted by fees and compulsory advertising expenditure. Weighting patents is desirable because of the rapid growth in applications after initial fees were reduced in the early 1880s. The expenditure data usually provides a better measure of intellectual property investment, with considerably more Granger causality relationships between output and patents expenditure identified than between output and unweighted applications. Nevertheless, there were still important, and sometimes complementary, relationships between patent applications and output. Output usually led patenting, particularly using expenditure data.