Country-Level Governance and Business Innovation: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

This systematic review aims to analyze, using the PRISMA 2020 protocol, how the level of governance in countries, and its dimensions, relate to innovative efforts and innovation outcomes in companies, and through which mechanisms this relationship occurs. Open-access articles in the fields of administration and economics were searched in Portuguese, English, and Spanish in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, on August 29, 2025. The criteria for including studies in the review were the use of WGI as the main or control variable for governance at the country level and, as dependent variables, technology transfer, innovation (patents, new products or processes), or innovative effort (R&D). To reduce the risk of bias, only studies published in peer-reviewed journals were used. After screening, the selected articles were read, and the information was extracted and organized in an Excel spreadsheet for subsequent synthesis and presentation of the results. Thirteen studies that met all the predefined criteria and had full text available were included. The results revealed that the institutional environment appears to be a structuring condition for innovation performance in companies. Effective governance, rule of law, political stability, and regulatory quality were identified by the studies as elements that increase investment in R&D and patent filings. The internal characteristics of companies also influence this performance. One limitation of this study was the restriction to open-access articles, which may have restricted the inclusion of potentially relevant studies and may have affected the comprehensiveness of the final sample. Furthermore, the limited number of published studies on the topic may restrict the generalizability of the results. On the other hand, this indicates the existence of a potentially promising research field to be explored. There was no funding for this work, which was registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform under the identifier osf.io/u849k.