Umirzak Shukeyev

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Innovative marketing increasingly requires reliable market intelligence signals that reduce uncertainty, support product positioning, and guide venture financing in technology-intensive green and digital markets. This study aims to assess how patent-based technological signals shape innovative market development by predicting the formation and venture financing of green and digital energy start-ups, while also examining whether entrepreneurial market entry and funding stimulate subsequent patenting activity. The empirical analysis is based on a balanced panel of 146 countries for 2000–2023, combining IEA energy start-up and funding indicators with OECD patent data. The empirical strategy follows a sequential design: descriptive statistics and log1p transformations are used to characterize the data; Dumitrescu–Hurlin panel Granger causality tests provide the main evidence on predictive causality; and PVAR, multiple-testing corrections, PPML and TWFE models are used as complementary robustness and dynamic checks. The results show highly concentrated innovative market development: average green and digital energy start-up activity is around 7 per country-year, while the median is 0 for both indicators. The Dumitrescu–Hurlin tests reveal 69 significant relationships out of 120, with stronger evidence for patents predicting start-up formation and funding than for the reverse direction. These findings remain robust after Benjamini–Hochberg correction and after excluding numerically extreme statistics. TWFE results support the positive association between climate adaptation and ICT-mitigation patents, digital energy start-up formation and early-stage digital funding, while PVAR models provide only complementary dynamic evidence and are interpreted cautiously due to stability limitations in the main GMM specification. Country fixed effects indicate that Ukraine has a more favorable estimated structural position for digital energy start-up formation than Kazakhstan and Armenia.

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Digital government is advancing worldwide while foreign investment contracts and becomes more selective, making it a first-order policy question whether e-government can attract capital without strong formal institutions. The study aims to establish whether the investment payoff of digital government depends on the rule of law in 15 post-Soviet economies, separating the within-country and between-country dimensions of this relationship over 2008–2024. A biennial panel aligned to the nine UN E-Government Survey waves (135 country-wave cells; baseline N = 120) is estimated with two-way fixed effects, a within-between specification that tests each dimension separately, an EGDI × Rule of Law interaction, wild cluster bootstrap inference, and a robustness battery of seventeen alternative specifications. Within countries, no complementarity is found. The interaction equals –0.191 (SE = 0.447, bootstrap p = 0.690, bootstrap 95% CI from –1.616 to 0.742), and the marginal effect of a one–standard–deviation EGDI increase is insignificant at every rule-of-law level (–0.979 to –1.481 percentage points of GDP). Between countries, the level association is null as well; the between-country slope equals –1.083 (bootstrap p = 0.692). The only conditional structure is exploratory and substitution-signed, an interaction of –2.619 outside the EU members (bootstrap p = 0.013) that does not survive correction for multiple specifications (Holm-adjusted p = 0.226). Digital government offers no detectable investment premium at either level.