Neoclassical economic theory states that the growth of the nation primarily is dependent on the innovation potential of the country. However, this theory is often being refuted by the recent empirical research, proving that the innovations are becoming more cost-extensive, late in generating return on invested capital and not as useful as they used to be. The present study researches the effect of innovation on the EU member-countries economic development, having selected R&D expenses, number of patents and number of researchers as innovation proxies. The results prove that there is a strong relationship between the R&D expenses and GDP growth as well as the labour productivity, but no evidence was found that the number of scientists or the number of patents significantly influence economic development of the country. The authors also ran a regression between the scientific productivity and impact and the GDP per capita to discover the strong relationship between the variables. However, the causality of the relationship should be studied further.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3846/bm.2016.56