The Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations at the country level and its dynamic evolution under the pressures of globalization

Using data from the Web of Science (WoS), we analyze the mutual information among university, industry, and government addresses (U-I-G) at the country level for a number of countries. The dynamic evolution of the Triple Helix can thus be compared among developed and developing nations in terms of cross-sectional coauthorship relations. The results show that the Triple Helix interactions among the three subsystems U-I-G become less intensive over time, but unequally for different countries. We suggest that globalization erodes local Triple Helix relations and thus can be expected to have increased differentiation in national systems since the mid-1990s. This effect of globalization is more pronounced in developed countries than in developing ones. In the dynamic analysis, we focus on a more detailed comparison between China and the United States. Specifically, the Chinese Academy of the (Social) Sciences is changing increasingly from a public research institute to an academic one, and this has a measurable effect on Chinaʹs position in the globalization.