What effect did the Great Recession have on innovation efficiency and the effectiveness of scarce resource management? Did countries with high GDPs and GDPs per capita sustain efficient innovation? How did the recession affect the time lag between innovation development and implementation? This book presents the most comprehensive data set in current economic literature to measure and compare the effect of GDP and GDP per capita on the efficiency of fifty-eight countries' national innovation systems during the Great Recession. A total of eighteen different models are applied to different groupings of the data, including data envelopment analyses and time lag effects. The result is a rich comparative resource for policy makers and economists alike.