THE CREATION AND DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

In this study, we review the literature on the creation and diffusion of innovation in the private sectors (industry and services) in developing countries. In particular, we collect evidence on what are the barriers to innovation creation and diffusion and the channels of innovation diffusion to and within developing countries. We find that innovation in developing countries is about creation or adoption of new ideas and technologies; but the capacity for innovation is embedded in and constituted by dynamics between geographical, socio‐economic, political and legal subsystems. We contextualize the findings from the review in the current theoretical framework of diffusion of innovations, and we emphasize how the institutional context typical of developing countries impacts the diffusion itself.     

INNOVATION POLICY: RATIONALES,LESSONS AND CHALLENGES

Innovation policy has emerged as a new field of economic policy during the last few decades. This paper explores the rationales for national innovation policies, as laid out in the existing literature on the subject, and considers what the lessons and challenges for theory and practice in this area are. Innovation policy attempts to influence innovation activity, often with the purpose of increasing economic growth. But it can also have more specific aims such as preventing unwarranted climate change, improving national health, and so on. The increasing attention given to innovation policy at the national level from the 1990s onwards went hand in hand with the development of a new, systemic understanding of innovation, which in a better way than before accounted for the ‘stylised facts’ of innovation activity as identified by empirical work. The system approach, as the paper shows, came to have a significant influence on the subsequent policy discourse. Drawing on recent advances in innovation-systems theory, a synthetic framework for the analysis of innovation policy is developed and used to highlight issues of particular relevance for the conduct of innovation policy and future scholarly work in this area.     

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN DERIVED LABOUR DEMAND MODELS: A HIERARCHICAL META‐REGRESSION ANALYSIS

The effect of technological innovation on employment is of major concern for workers and their unions, policy makers and academic researchers. We meta‐analyse 570 estimates from 35 primary studies that estimate a derived labour demand model. We contribute to existing attempts at evidence synthesis by addressing the risks of selection bias and that of data dependence in observational studies. Our findings indicate that: (i) hierarchical meta‐regression models are sufficiently versatile for addressing both selection bias and data dependence in observational data; (ii) innovation's effect on employment is positive but small and highly heterogeneous; (iii) only a small part of residual heterogeneity is explained by moderating factors; (iv) selection bias tends to reflect preference for upholding prevalent hypotheses on the employment effects of process and product innovations; (v) country‐specific effect‐size estimates are related to labour market and product market regulation in six OECD countries in a U‐shaped fashion; and (vi) OLS estimates reflect upward bias whereas those based on time‐differenced or within estimators reflect a downward bias. Our findings point out to a range of data quality and modelling issues that should be addressed in future research.     

QUALITATIVE AND MIXED‐METHODS RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS: SURPRISING GROWTH,PROMISING FUTURE

Qualitative research in economics has traditionally been unimportant compared to quantitative work. Yet there has been a small explosion in use of quantitative approaches in the past 10–15 years, including ‘mixed‐methods’ projects which use qualitative and quantitative methods in combination. This paper surveys the growing use of qualitative methods in economics and closely related fields, aiming to provide economists with a useful roadmap through major sets of qualitative methods and how and why they are used. We review the growing body of economic research using qualitative approaches, emphasizing the gains from using qualitative‐ or mixed‐methods over traditional ‘closed‐ended’ approaches. It is argued that, although qualitative methods are often portrayed as less reliable, less accurate, less powerful and/or less credible than quantitative methods, in fact, the two sets of methods have their own strengths, and how much can be learned from one type of method or the other depends on specific issues that arise in studying the topic of interest. The central message of the paper is that well‐done qualitative work can provide scientifically valuable and intellectually helpful ways of adding to the stock of economic knowledge, especially when applied to research questions for which they are well suited.     

A REVIEW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY REPORT,PUNCHING OUR WEIGHT: THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN PUBLIC POLICY MAKING1

The report argues that policy‐makers fail to make effective use of the high quality research of UK academics in the humanities and social sciences. Yet greater co‐operation between the government and academia could undermine the independence of the latter by increasing the role of the state in the funding and direction of university research.