The Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) was designed as an interactive tool for benchmarking a country’s position vis-a-vis others in the global knowledge economy. The KAM produces a range of comparative data tables, charts and diagrams focusing either on the overall knowledge economy position or on its component parts. In fact, within the knowledge economy framework, the KAM can essentially cut and dice the analysis any way the user wants.  KAM can, for example, facilitate the comparison of a particular country with:  (a) All countries in  the sample (146 countries).  (b) Other countries in the region. The 8 available regions are: G7, Western Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Regional comparisons can also be undertaken to see how a particular region compares to another. (c) All countries within a particular  income level, classified according to World Bank estimates of Gross National Income (GNI) per capita.  One of the most popular KAM display modes is the Basic Scorecard. It consists of 14 key variables that are used to derive a country's overall Knowledge (KI) and Knowledge Economy (KEI) indexes.  For most of the scorecard types, 2 versions have been developed: (i) the default weighted scorecard version, in which three key innovation variables are weighted by population and (ii) the unweighted scorecard version in which the same three Innovation variables are presented in terms of absolute values. The 2 versions have been developed because in innovation, absolute size of resources matters, as there are strong economies of scale in the production of knowledge and because knowledge is not consumed in its use. Populous countries, such as India and China, have a critical mass of innovative capacity which is not reflected when variables are scaled by population.  Overall, the KAM is best suited to providing a preliminary or ‘starter’ knowledge economy assessment of a country. It has the ability to identify quickly and succinctly key strengths and weaknesses, areas for development and even anomalies in the available data for a given country. The KAM results, however, should be treated with some caution. Further data sources and analysis are usually required to confirm issues or trends. 
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