Government and Technical Progress: A Cross-Industry Analysis (The Technology Policy and Economic Growth Series)

Nelson, Richard R.

Business & Money

Pergamon Pr

Japan was the first major non-western nation to take on board the Western technological and organizational advances of the century after the fist industrial revolution. It subsequently proved fully able to exploit and contribute to the broad, sustained technological advances that began in the twentieth century, as science became harnessed to technology. Japan's economic development remains a model for many technologically less advanced countries which have not yet mastered modern technology to organizational forms; and a knowledge of Japanese technological and economic history can contribute importantly to our understanding of economic growth in the modern era. This book studies the industrial development of Japan since the mid-nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the various industries built technological capabilities. The Japanese were extraordinarily creative in searching out and learning to use modern technologies, and the authors investigate the emergence of entrepreneurs who began new and risky businesses, how the business organizations evolved to cope with changing technological conditions, and how the managers, engineers and workers acquired organizational and technological skills through technology importation, learning-by-doing, and their own R&D activities. The book investigates the interaction between private entrepreneural activities and public policy, through a general examination of economic and industrial development, a study of the evolution of management systems, and six industrial case studies: textiles, iron and steel, electrical and communications equipment, automobiles, shipbuilding and aircraft, and pharmaceuticals. The authors show how the Japanese government has played an important supportive role in the continuing innovation, without being a substitute for aggressive business enterprise constantly venturing into unfamiliar terrains.

Technology and Industrial Development in Japan: Building Capabilities by Learning, Innovation and Public Policy (Japan Business and Economics Series)

Goto, Akira

Odagiri, Hiroyuki

Computers & Technology

Oxford University Press

Intellectual Property Rights, Development, and Catch Up: An International Comparative Study

For most countries, economic development involves a process of "catching up" with leading countries at the time. This is never achieved solely by physical assets and labour alone: also needed are the accumulation of technological capabilities, educational attainment, entrepreneurship, and the development of the necessary institutional infrastructure. One element of this infrastructure is the regime of intellectual property rights (Ipr), particularly patents. Patents may promote innovation and catch up, and they may foster formal technology transfer. Yet they may also prove to be barriers for developing countries that intend to acquire technologies through imitation and reverse engineering. The current move to harmonize the Ipr system internationally, such as the Trips agreement, may thus have unexpected consequences for developing countries. This book explores these issues through an in depth study of eleven countries ranging from early developers (the Usa, the Nordic Countries, and Japan), and Post-World War Ii countries (Korea, Taiwan, Israel) to more recent emerging economies (Argentina, Brazil, China, India, and Thailand). With contributions from international experts on innovation systems, this book will be an invaluable resource for academics and policymakers in the fields of economic development, innovation studies and intellectual property laws.

Sunami, Atsushi

Economics

The Moon and the Ghetto (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)

The moon and the ghetto (Fels lectures on public policy analysis)

Norton

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

W.W.Norton&Company

This book begins by discussing the growing appreciation by economists that technical change is a powerful force tied up with many arenas of economic activity. Nelson's central argument is that this recognition calls for a change in economic analysis to a style that better comprehends that technical change is an evolutionary process. New data is presented on the factors influencing technical change in different industries. These data permit a deeper look into the forces behind the great inter-industry differences in R and D and technical change. The book concludes with a detailed examination of the institutions involved in technical change in advanced capitalist economies. Parts of the system are keyed to rivalry, but there is inter-firm cooperation and sharing as well. There are public funds and institutions in the system, as well as private. Nelson's thought-provoking work combines in a masterly way deep theoretical insight with detailed understanding of the functioning of present-day institutions. This book is a contribution not simply to understanding of technical change, but to understanding of economic dynamics more generally.

Understanding Technical Change As an Evolutionary Process (PROFESSOR DR F DE VRIES LECTURES IN ECONOMICS)

Elsevier Science Ltd.

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.
Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world's premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.
Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.

The Sources of Economic Growth

Harvard University Press

This volume mounts a full-blown attack on the standard neo-classical theory of economic growth, which Richard Nelson sees as hopelessly inadequate to explain the phenomenon of economic growth. He presents an alternative theory which highlights that economic growth driven by technological advance involves disequilibrium in a fundamental and continuing way. Nelson also argues that a theory of economic growth driven by technological advance must recognize a range of institutions, such as universities, public laboratories, and government agencies, in addition to business firms and markets. He further argues that growth theories that focus on an aggregate measure of growth, such as GNP per capita, are blind to what is going on beneath the aggregate, where differing rates of advance in different sectors, and the birth and death of industries are an essential part of the growth process. The broad theory of economic growth Nelson presents sees the process as involving the co-evolution of technologies, institutions, and industry structure.

Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth

This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilib

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change

Winter, Sidney G.

This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms.
To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium.
The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Belknap Press)

Belknap Press

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