Where actual inventive performance is concerned, however, patenting activity appears to provide the best measure of national inventiveness. The first specific measure consists simply of identifying the level of domestic patenting activity both generally and in the specific technology areas mentioned previously. But because patenting systems and the laws governing intellectual property rights vary across countries, a useful complementary measure of inventiveness consists of measuring not simply domestic patenting but patents sought and secured by inventors in foreign countries, especially the United States. Patenting in the United States is actually an appropriate metric for assessing the inventiveness of all other countries, since the United States not only has an excellent and well-organized patent office but is also the wealthiest country, whose economic system attracts leading-edge technologies that foreign inventors would seek to protect for purposes of revenue generation both in the United States and abroad. These foreign patents secured within the United States should again be measured both in aggregate terms as well as in dis-aggregated form, focusing on activity in the high-technology fields identified earlier.