Sovereign rows of the World Bank / WIPO “Patent applications, residents” indicator. Top 30 by most recent year. Values in thousands. Aggregates excluded.
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How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Patent Applications by Residents (Time Series)” reformats data published by the World Bank (World Bank indicator code IP.PAT.RESD). Values are expressed in thousand.
What to watch. The handover around 2010, when China overtakes long-time leader Japan and accelerates past 1.5 million filings a year. Keep in mind you are watching a map of quantity — international filing rates and citations would draw a rather different one.
Caveats. This counts resident applications, not granted patents or international (PCT) filings, and subsidy-driven filing surges inflate totals without matching inventive output. Pair it with PCT counts or citation measures before drawing quality conclusions.
Trends in the data
China’s rise has no comparable case in this table. It went from 4.1 thousand filings in 1985 to 1,426.6 thousand in 2021 — 348× in 36 years. As late as 2000 it stood at 25.3 thousand, a fifteenth of Japan’s 387.4 thousand. From there it stacked up 93.5 thousand in 2005, 293.1 in 2010, 968.3 in 2015 and 1,344.8 in 2020. In 2021 China alone accounts for 62.8% of the 2,273 thousand filings made by these 30 countries. Given that the 30-country total in 1980 was 327 thousand, China now files roughly four times the whole world of that era.
Japan passed its peak more than twenty years ago. Filings rose from 165.7 thousand in 1980 to a high of 387.4 thousand in 2000, then fell to 290.1 in 2010, 258.8 in 2015 and 222.5 in 2021 — 57% of the peak. Even so it remains 1.34× its 1980 level and has slipped only from 1st to 3rd. Holding third place while declining says as much about how few countries are closing from below.
Those that are closing are in Asia. South Korea went from 1.2 thousand in 1980 to 186.2 thousand in 2021, a 155× increase, moving from 17th to 4th. India rose from 1.2 to 26.3 thousand, 21.92×, from 18th to 6th; Iran from 22nd to 11th, Türkiye from 23rd to 12th and Singapore from 24th to 18th. Countries filing around a thousand applications in 1980 are now at roughly a tenth of Japan’s volume.
Some countries file fewer patents than they used to. The United Kingdom fell from 19.6 to 11.6 thousand, a factor of 0.59, dropping from 4th to 28th; Switzerland from 4.0 to 1.3 thousand, 0.33×, from 9th to 27th; Sweden from 4.1 to 1.8, 8th to 21st; Poland from 6.2 to 3.4; Spain from 13th to 26th. Western Europe’s across-the-board decline probably reflects filings migrating from national routes to the European Patent Office and the PCT. What this indicator counts is resident filings at the national office, not the total volume of invention — and volume is not the same as quality: patents from Japan, the United States, Germany and South Korea carry a high share of international (PCT) filings, while most Chinese patents remain domestic.
Trivia quiz
What is the system by which a state grants an exclusive right to exploit an invention for a limited time?
A patent. The number of applications is a common proxy for how active a country's innovation is. (Source)
Which UN agency oversees global intellectual property and runs the international (PCT) patent system?
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), headquartered in Geneva. (Source)
Why are patent filings split into "resident" and "non-resident" applications?
To separate domestic innovation (residents) from foreign parties securing rights (non-residents); this ranking uses resident filings. (Source)
Source
World Bank / WIPO — Patent applications, residents (IP.PAT.RESD)