What causes K-waves?

This commentary on the Devezas-Corredine paper raises three questions: how do we think and how do we need to think about K-waves, what causes K-waves in the Devezas-Corredine model, and in what sense do social and biological factors add to a better understanding of large-scale structural changes in the world economy.     

Visionary projects: a viable rationale for human space-flight?

Today's prevailing geo-political and socio-economic climate is proving unfavourable towards justifying on-going and future human space-flight programmes. Traditionally cited benefits, such as scientific and aconomic progress or political advantages, are widely deemed insufficient reasons for spending considerable amounts of public funds. A rationale for human space-flight, evoking visions such as exploitation of extraterrestrial resources or human exploration of space, has to cope with an unavoidable dilemma: attractive as they may appear, these projects are fraught with many grave uncertainties and risks. This paper attempts to answer the question over what, if any, significance such visionary projects may assume in justifying the continuation of human space-flight activities. We argue that, despite as yet unanswerable technological and economical questions, and despite the extremely long time-frames involved, it seems reasonable and, hence, justified to keep the option of being able to solve by means of humans in space the impending energy crisis in the coming century.     

The future of foresight—A US perspective

The growing interest in business, government, and other organizations and users of futures research in the next ten to thirty years implies that the interest is largely to promote better strategic thinking and planning. Popular in the current futures lexicon is ‘strategic foresight’. This article characterizes, as best the author can, the key characteristics of strategic foresight, under whatever name it occurs, by American futurists. The most central characteristic of American futurists and their approach as practiced around the world is eclectic flexibility in methods and techniques. The American approach is illustrated by the author's own decades of work for organizational clients.     

Backcasting images of the future city—Time and space for sustainable development in Stockholm

This paper presents and discusses a backcasting study for Stockholm 2050. The focus is on developing images of a future where Stockholm citizens have sustainable energy use—here defined as a 60% reduction per capita over a 50-year period. The perspective is that of households, so all energy is allocated to individuals’ activities rather than being discussed from a sector perspective. Six images of the future are developed by combining a space dimension (three versions of changes in urban structure) and a time dimension (two versions of people's life tempo). Added to this is technological development, so that the images of the future illustrate how combinations of planning, behavioural change and technological development could lead to sustainable energy use.     

Models for innovation diffusion: Vijay Mahajan and Robert A. Peterson; A Sage University Series on “Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences,” No. 07-048, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1985.

Developing countries wish to achieve in a few decades what the developed countries accomplished in many centuries under conditions of relatively lesser resource constraints. Therefore, the developing countries cannot emulate the evolutionary experiences of the developed countries; they need a revolutionary approach in their development strategies. One plausible option for this revolutionary orientation could be the utilization of a technology-based strategy for national development planning. This article proposes undertaking certain measurement activities with respect to the technological system of a country, which would enable national decision makers to use technology as a strategic variable for socioeconomic development. The article briefly describes the role of technology as the master key for sustainable development, discusses the current activities related to the measurement of technology, presents a few conceptual schemes, and a framework for the assessment of national technological capabilities and needs.     

International generation of technology: an assessment of its intensity,motives and facilitators

This paper assesses two decades of international generation of technology through EPO data: we quantify its volume, analyse its motives and identify several business traits that facilitate its implementation. Our database, which is composed of 65,000 firms and 465,000 patents, shows that most technological activities are still carried out in the home country of multinationals. We nevertheless find that the international generation of technology has been continuously increasing during the 80s and 90s. This growing trend partially reflects the use of global technological supply as a source of new competences; however, data verifies that adapting products and processes to foreign markets is an even more relevant motive. Lastly, after controlling for the home country and geographic diversification of multinationals, we search for structural and technological business features that make the internationalisation of their technological activities easier. Our model thus verifies the relevance of the size and technological activity of parent companies.     

The improbability of space colonies

Although settlements in space appear to be in the offing, scrutiny of this idea uncovers several obstacles to their establishment. The colonies could not offer the unfettered existence that proponents such as Gerard O'Neill suggest; life in space would have to be highly regimented and unappealing. It is unlikely that the colonies, operating on the furthest fringes of the marketplace, could be economically viable. Their technological feasibility is also in question. Finally, the chances that competition with the USSR will lead to space settlements are small.     

Dynamic R&D competition with memory

We consider a differential game of R&D competition and explore the impact of rivalry on the firms' investment behavior over time. Using closed-loop strategies and hence allowing for strategic interactions among rival firms we show that R&D spending by the individual competitor is increased due to competition in the race for priority. This leads us to argue that competitive encounters enhance R&D activities at the same time as increasing efficiency in the race for a technological breakthrough.     

Integrating time and space in technological substitution models

This article presents a model that simultaneously considers both time and space dimensions of innovation adoption for forecasting technological substitution. An empirical illustration is presented, and model limitations and further extensions are discussed.     

Has Productivity Contributed to China's Growth?

This paper applies an extended Solow approach to examine the role of productivity in China's economic growth. The extended Solow approach allows the decomposition of output growth into factor contributions, technological progress and efficiency change. It is found that total factor productivity (TFP) has on average contributed to 13.5 percent of China's economic growth in the past two decades. This contribution is mainly due to technological progress which tends to accelerate over time. However, during 1982–97 efficiency change due to catch–up has been very volatile, reflecting the uncertainties associated with economic reforms and transition in China.     

On semi-industrialized countries and the acquisition of advanced technological capabilities

The last decades have witnessed a breaking down of the hitherto quasi-monopoly in industrial and technological development held by highly industrialized countries. Man-made changes in comparative advantage due to rapid accumulation of human capital, development of technical institutions and public policies in support of enterprise development and innovation, have led to the emergence of advanced technical capabilities in a number of semi-industrialized countries. Study of selected instances of their technological achievement shows that they cannot be adequately interpreted as necessarily requiring the working of a well-integrated national innovation system. They seem to be instead path, or process, dependent and determined by the circumstantial convergence of requisite skills, appropriate institutions and supportive public policies.     

Spatial growth and industry age

Between 1970 and 2000 employment growth across U.S. counties exhibited very different patterns in manufacturing and services. Whereas manufacturing employment growth was negatively related to initial manufacturing employment across the entire distribution of counties, service employment growth was positively related to initial service employment for intermediate sized counties. This paper presents a theory to rationalize these facts. Local sectoral growth is driven by technological diffusion across space and depends on the age of the sector. The theory correctly predicts the relation between county employment growth and initial county employment in manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century.     

The responsibility of futurists in strategic foresight — Hungarian examples

The Futures Studies Department at the Corvinus University of Budapest conducted a few strategic foresight projects at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The goals of two projects were to increase the regional competitiveness of two towns in Hungary; whereas, two other projects dealt with the long-term, 15- to 20- year-long, macro-development opportunities of Hungary. They focused on defining social trends that influence the long-term decision-making environment of the regions and the country. The two types of experience made it possible to enhance strategic foresight by defining the role and responsibility of professional futurists and average, everyday people.     

Innovation and Economic Growth in East Asia: An Overview

East Asia has been one of the most dynamic regions of economic growth and development. The past two decades have seen tremendous economic and technological catching up in the region. Using South Korea as a case to illustrate the process of technology catching up, we find that the process of graduating from imitation to innovation is a nonlinear one, and requires conscious efforts to invest in research and development and other technological capability‐enhancing activities. Successful technology upgrading also calls for policies and institutions that are relevant to technological innovation to evolve and adapt as an economy goes through the different stages of economic and technological development.     

A historical investigation of the geography of innovative activities

Research and development activities, as well as all other economic activities, do not occur in a spaceless economy, but are related to particular geographical areas. This paper investigates to what extent technological activities have a tendency to concentrate in centres of excellence or to diffuse across many countries. A framework for the identification of different technological trends is created. The main findings of this paper show the existence of four different technological trends, two of them connected to the characteristics of the national system of innovation of countries and the other two related to the particular features of technology.     

Technological content of exports

A large body of literature argues that the characteristics of exports matter for economic growth and development because some goods trigger positive externalities or are subject to increasing returns. Thus, for policy purposes, it is important to know whether a country’s export basket enjoys these productive opportunities. They have been associated with technological content of exports. However, measuring them is not easy. Previous methodologies to account for exports’ technological content used either R&;D data or trade data. The former is used to account for knowledge-intensive activities during the production phase and the latter to identify levels of ‘sophistication’ of exports based on exporting countries’ characteristics. Building on these contributions, this paper combines industry-based and product-based indicators to circumvent some of the shortcomings of the received literature, including the product-industry controversy (i.e. are the actual activities during the production process or the product characteristics what better accounts exports’ technological content?). We use data from Uruguay on direct and indirect R&;D spending from public and private sources and also trade data to build the sophistication index corrected by quality. We contrast our findings with existing methodologies to highlight our contribution.     

Type space on a purely measurable parameter space

Summary. Several game theoretical topics require the analysis of hierarchical beliefs, particularly in incomplete information situations. For the problem of incomplete information, Harsányi suggested the concept of the type space. Later Mertens and Zamir gave a construction of such a type space under topological assumptions imposed on the parameter space. The topological assumptions were weakened by Heifetz, and by Brandenburger & Dekel. In this paper we show that at very natural assumptions upon the structure of the beliefs, the universal type space does exist. We construct a universal type space, which employs purely a measurable parameter space structure.Received: 12 August 2002, Revised: 1 March 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C70, C79, D80, D82.Miklós Pintér: The author wishes to thank Péter Tallos, Tamás Solymosi, and an anonymous referee for their suggestions and comments. This work was supported by OTKA grant T046194.     

Redistribution policy and the expansion of the public sector

During the first part of this century, life-cycle and insurance-type considerations seem to have dominated redistribution policy, in particular when we look at the consequences for the expansion of public spending. By contrast, during recent decades, ‘fragmented horizontal redistributions’ between various minority groups have probably been the most important mechanisms. The self-interest of different groups of the electorate seems to have provided the most powerful motive behind these various policies, although welfare altruism and what in this paper are called considerations of ‘consequential externalities’ have probably been important motives behind redistribution in favor of the poor.     

地理距离和技术外溢效应-对技术和经济集聚现象的空间计量学解释

本文发现技术和经济活动都存在局部集聚,技术集聚度高于经济;两者的集聚度随时间增强,地理分布高度一致。随地理距离快速下降的技术溢出效应是导致局部集聚和东西部发展不均问题的原因之一。结果表明,在一到两个省的范围或800公里内为技术的密集溢出区;800公里以上为快速下降区,技术溢出效应强度减半的距离为1 250公里。R&D外部性、人力资本流动以及市场的竞争和合作是导致技术外溢的主要原因。强化以上因素作用将有助于区域的平衡。     

Strategic Role of Technological Self-Reliance in Development Management

Thanks to technological advancements, every society — throughout the world — is now better off than before. Although this is true for all societies considered in an aggregate manner, within each society and between different societies, the relative gaps in prosperity are increasing. Reversing these gaps is the most important challenge for human development in the twenty-first century. A thorough scrutiny of the causes for the observed negative trends would indicate that technological gap is at the root of all. Success stories clearly tell us that technological capacity building is the best foundation for any meaningful economic growth that leads to a higher standard of living and greater prosperity for the citizens of a country. Moreover, technology-based creative problem solving and the ability to manage technological innovation are essential prerequisites for the success of contemporary business executives operating in the competitive globalized market environment. Paying attention to these lessons is the call of the day for any developing country government as well as for the business executives of that country. This article discusses the strategic role of technological self-reliance in development management, in terms of what we have learned so far and where we should be going, so as to reverse the widening technological capacity gap between the developed and developing countries.