(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-09)
Fagerberg, Jan; Srholec, Martin
Innovation is, as Joseph Schumpeter once pointed out, above all a combinatory phenomenon.
Success in accessing knowledge and exploiting it in a way that is beneficial for development
depends on the ability to combine many different skills and resources, of which many will be
external to the firm. Arguably, political choices, past as well as present, the quality of
governance and the business environment, availability of skills, finance and broader social
and cultural characteristics may all have a say for how well this combinatory dynamics works.
Based on a review of the literature on how technological, economic and social factors interact
in the development process this paper sets out to explore these interrelationships empirically.
The results, based on data for 75 countries on different levels of development, suggest that
there is a strong correlation between technological capability, (innovation-friendly)
governance and social capital, confirming, it is suggested, the important role played by
politics and deeper social and cultural factors for technological catch-up (or lack of such).
This contrasts with the role played by for instance openness to trade, FDI, etc., which -
according to the results presented here - hardly correlates with anything.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004)
Fagerberg, Jan; Knell, Mark; Srholec, Martin
Why do some countries grow much faster, and have much better trade performance, than other countries? What are the crucial factors behind such differences, and what can governments do in order to improve the relative position of their economies? This paper outlines a synthetic framework, based on Schumpeterian logic, for analysing such questions. Four different aspects of competitiveness are identified; technology, costs, capacity and demand. The framework is applied to a sample of 49 countries between 1993 and 2001.