Private Foreign Investment in India: Pain or Panacea?

Private foreign capital, whose presence in Indian industry was long regarded with concern and suspicion, is now presented as a panacea for India's poor industrial and export performance. This paper examines available evidence to compare the behaviour and performance of domestic and foreign‐controlled firms in India over the last five decades. It discusses the contribution of foreign capital to aggregate investment, balance of payments and economic growth. We assess the effects of government policy towards foreign investment, review recent changes, and outline implications for the future.     

Book reviews

Conclusion This book argues convincingly that the history of technologies play a major part in current economic evolution. It provides data, figures and explanations related to public policies but does not take into account domestic industrial dynamics and does not explain how national leaders have emerged in high tech industries. Intuitively, one can imagine that the history of firms and industries play a part as well as the history of public policies.European data relate at the best up to 1988 and are scarce relative to the detailed presentation of American public policies (see for examples the data related to basic research between 1975 and 1988 (p. 131).The book aims very clearly to suggest guidelines to the American administration public policies devoted to technologies in order to maintain the leadership of US firms in high tech industries. Unfortunately, the conclusions are not very clear-cut and it is difficult to draw lesson for European countries or for the NICs as the authors themselves think these conclusions are hazardous even in the US case.     

Competition,Rivalry And Innovative Behaviour ∗

This paper is an empirical study of the importance of competition and rivalry in explaining innovative behaviour by software firms. The paper distinguishes between two notions of competition. One in which rivalry occurs due the possession of greater market power, and the other in which rivalry occurs due to diffennces in the abilities of firms. In addition the paper also decomposes changes in the extent of innovation due to the activities of firms that are innovators and due to changes in the probability of innovating. Competition always influences the extent of innovation by changing the propensity of firms to innovate.     

Marshall’s disciples: knowledge and innovation driving regional economic development and growth

Studies of knowledge and innovation as driving forces of regional development and growth offer a myriad of approaches. Here, questions asked, methods used and answers given are manifold. In our overview, we cover recent developments in this research area. Moreover, we explore the question as to the extent to which approaches in this research area compete with or complement one another. It turns out that the various studies are much more complementary than competitive. However, there is still much ground to be covered before we fully understand the processes underlying the creation and dissemination of knowledge and innovation leading to regional development and growth.JEL Classification: R11, O32, O33, O18 Correspondence to: Claudia WerkerThis Special Issue is the outcome of the workshop on Knowledge and Innovation in Creating and Sustaining Regional Growth in a Global Environment held at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, July 10 ^th until 12 ^th , 2003. Financial support by the Dutch research council (NWO), the Centre for Economic Research (CfER) of the Open University Milton Keynes (UK) as well as by Eindhoven Center for Innovation Studies (ECIS, The Netherlands) is gratefully acknowledged; as is the organizational support by ECIS. We are grateful for helpful comments by Ron Boschma and Joachim Schwerin. Moreover, we would like to thank Uwe Cantner for his kind support in making this Special Issue happen. Naturally, the usual disclaimer applies.