Through the accumulation of intellectual capital, enterprises produce new products and services to create new demand, and countries establishes new economic structures to promote economic growth. In particular, the role of intellectual capital has recently been highlighted as an important factor in economic growth. This is due to the development of information technology and the emergence of fusion and hybrid industries led by the fourth industrial revolution.Although intellectual capital can be defined in various ways, the variables that have been mainly used in previous studies include research in science and technology, R&D investment, and patents. These variables are closely related to the characteristics of intellectual capital. For instance, R&D investment is an input factor for intellectual capital accumulation, and research in science and technology, and patent applications are the result of intellectual capital accumulation. In other words, each stage of intellectual capital can be grasped as a whole by analyzing research in science and technology, R&D investments, and patents simultaneously. In this paper, the intellectual capital is defined as research in science and technology, R & D investments, and patents.In this respect, existing studies have the following limitations. First, previous studies addressed each variable as factors of economic growth separately, which is inconsistent with the intellectual capital theory. In other words, previous studies sought to identify the effect of a single variable such as R&D investment on economic growth or firm performance. In addition, since it improves cost structure of the country, intellectual capital accumulation can also be characterized as a social overhead capital. However, previous studies failed to perform analysis in this perspective. Second, due to the lack of national level data, the majority of studies limited the role of intellectual capital to the effects on firm performance. However, international organizations have been providing accumulated intellectual capital data at national-level since 2000. Thus, unlike in the past, as there are sufficiently accumulated national-level intellectual capital data at this point, it is necessary to discuss the role of intellectual capital in economic growth in more depth.In order to clarify the holistic role of intellectual capital, in the current study, independent variables included research(paper) in science and technology, R&D expenditures, and patent applications in the same economic growth model. This paper also defined the intellectual capital as a social overhead capital of each country. To this end, each intellectual capital was set as the stock variables accumulated over the past three years, and the theoretical background that is used to explain the relationship between social overhead capital and economic growth was applied in this study. In addition, the current study analyzed the role of the intellectual capital by industry and country. To this end, the industries were classified as manufacturing, service, and agriculture, and the countries were classified into developed, developing, and low-developed countries according to UNDP ;;s national classification of human development index (HDI). For the analysis, panel data from 2000 to 2014 were constructed for 120 countries using databases from various international organizations.The model and explanatory variables were based on the long-run economic growth model of Levine and Renelt (2002), which is based on Leamer;;s (1983) Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA). However, the paper conducted panel analysis, which is different from previous studies. The results of the panel analysis are presented as fixed effect model and random effect model based on Hausman test results.The results of the study can be summarized as follows. First, every intellectual capital stock promoted economic growth. This implies that the intellectual capital plays a role as social overhead capital in the economic growth of each country. Second, the intellectual capital also plays a role in promoting growth in all industrial sectors. This suggests that the intellectual capital is not concentrated only on specific industries but directly or indirectly affects all industries through spill-over effects. Finally, even if analyzed by different country, accumulation of the intellectual capital is closely related to economic growth in all countries.These results provide important policy implications for the accumulation of the intellectual capital. According to the analysis,investment in intellectual capital is crucial for national economic growth, and it promotes economic growth in both developed and developing countries as well as low-developed countries. In addition, as there is a spill-over effect, it initiates an inter-industry ripple effect. Thus, in the cases of developing countries and the low-developed countries, it is crucial to set the investment of intellectual capital as a priority of the national growth policy since the marginal effect of intellectual capital is very high in the early development stage. As for developed countries, it is still necessary to accumulate enough intellectual capital considering the inter-industry ripple effect, even if the marginal effect of intellectual capital is minimal.
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