The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new ...Information Technologies (IT) by using different business models and carving out unique positions in the global IT production networks. In this book Dan Breznitz asks why economies of different countries develop in different ways, and his answer relies on his exhaustive research into the comparative experiences of Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland-states that made different choices to nurture the growth of their IT industries.
The role of the state in economic development has changed, Breznitz concludes, but it has by no means disappeared. He offers a new way of thinking about state-led rapid-innovation-based industrial development that takes into account the ways production and innovation are now conducted globally. And he offers specific guidelines to help states make advantageous decisions about research and development, relationships with foreign firms and investors, and other critical issues.
Few observers are unimpressed by the economic ambition of China or by the nation's remarkable rate of growth. But what does the future hold? This meticulously researched book closely examines the ...strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese economic system to discover where the nation may be headed and what the Chinese experience reveals about emerging market economies. The authors find that contrary to popular belief, cutting edge innovation is not a prerequisite for sustained economic vitality-and that China is a perfect case in point.
Abstract
Market and hierarchical/organizational failures have long been the target of public policies explicitly aimed to mitigate their negative effects. However, in spite of a growing interest in ...policies around industrial clusters and business networks, scholarship on public efforts at remediating network failures has been ad hoc and lacking a binding theory. A central question is what strategies public agencies employ to repair network failures. We begin to answer this question by distinguishing between two distinct approaches: (1) “network construction” in which government agents actively build, re-shape, or thicken the structures of private sector networks; and (2) “network activation” in which government agents seek to alter the internal dynamics of existing private sector networks. To provide empirical support for these concepts, we provide a series of short international examples to illustrate the scope of network remediation activities as well as two in-depth cases that demonstrate how these mechanisms can work: the Canadian Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) and the specialized Mexican Lead Substitution Program.
Disability policy is often characterized as comprising three different components: citizenship rights, labor market integration and social protection. In this study, we present a fourth component - ...disability-related innovation. Specifically we analyze two critical interrelated questions: what governments do to guide innovation in this area; and do patterns of greater government disability policy involvement in social-democratic welfare states apply in the case of innovation? Utilizing a qualitative comparison of Germany, Israel, Sweden and the United States, we find that while policy across all countries is at first glance decisively similar, the important differences that exist cannot be satisfactorily explained within the classical welfare state typology framework. Countries that are leaders in terms of social support for disabled people - Germany and Sweden - are not necessarily leaders in disability-related innovation. This is particularly noticeable in the case of programs for support of Assistive Technology development.
This study characterizes and compares innovation policy as it applies to disabled people in Germany, Israel, Sweden and the United States.
Innovation policy's two main components are regulation that requires Universal Design, which requires that new technologies are designed to be usable by disabled people as well as others, and financial and institutional support for the development of Assistive Technologies.
Cross-country ideological and political differences fail to explain differences in disability-related innovation because innovation policymaking tends to be apolitical.
Only Israel and the United States created government programs dedicated to the support of Assistive Technology development.
To better serve disabled people, policymakers should formalize and fully support the development of Assistive Technology, as well as expand Universal Design regulation and enforcement.
Abstract Our understanding of innovation policies has been enhanced. However, there is still a gap in conceptualizing the effectiveness of one of innovation policy’s most important tools: financial ...incentives (FIs). Scholars developed an understanding of the effectiveness of direct versus indirect FIs, but there is no clear theoretical framework that delineates what kind of financial instruments impact what kind of innovation under what conditions. This paper analyzes the different working and operational logic of the wide array of employed FI worldwide to develop what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first conceptual framework discerning what financial tools fit what aims and contexts. This framework allows the development of testable hypotheses as well as the development of incentives tailored differently for different national innovation missions and market structures, suggesting that the growing reliance among OECD countries on indirect FIs in the form of tax incentives is less then optimal.
► We examine the claim the overseas returnees were central to initiating development of the information and communication technology industries in Taiwan, China, and India. ► We show that returnee ...entrepreneurs played a major role only after domestic entrepreneurs had created the early successful ICT firms. ► Returnee entrepreneurs were more important in the expansion rather than initial phase. ► Developing nations should emphasize developing their policy and regulatory environment for indigenous entrepreneurship rather than court returnee entrepreneurs.
Recently, the role of returnees in the economic development of various East Asian nations has received much attention. The early literature on the relocation of the most highly trained individuals from a developing nation to a developed nation viewed the phenomena as a “brain drain.” Since the 1990s, a new strand of thinking has suggested that for developing nations this was actually a positive phenomenon; as these expatriates studied and then worked abroad, they absorbed technical expertise, managerial, and entrepreneurial skills. These theories stipulated that these expatriates then returned home, and ignited a virtuous circle of technological entrepreneurship leading to rapid economic development. Much of this literature gives returnees a critical role in the home country's take-off period of the local information and communications technology (ICT) industry. This interpretative essay examines the evidence for three of the most prominent East Asian economic success stories – Taiwan, China and India – to determine the actual role played by returnees in their ICT industries’ growth. The key question is whether returnees were critical for the initial development period, or whether they played an important role only in the later, expansionary phase of the industry. We find, contrary to the current literature that returnees were not critical, in the initial formation of these countries’ ICT industries, but did play an active role in the secondary developmental phase after indigenous entrepreneurs and policy makers had laid the groundwork for the industry.
•Innovation policy could be employed as a social policy tool to address social disadvantageThis study explores four types of innovation policies that address different categories of social ...disadvantage.•While such policies are employed across different developed nations, they are adopted for primarily economic, not social, purposes.
Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies generate economic inequities. In this paper, we explore policies that could be devised and employed with the aim of increasing growth while taking into account economic distribution. We call these policies distribution-sensitive innovation policies (DSIP). Following an exploratory theoretical approach, the paper focuses on a specific set of DSIP which are focused on particular groups of disadvantaged producers and consumers. We first categorize such programs into four types, and then employ a comparative approach to analyze existing programs in terms of these types, first, in our primary case study, Israel, and, then, using the United States, Germany, and Sweden as limited shadow cases to elaborate on the finding from our primary case. We conclude by arguing that although these programs are currently driven primarily by a concern for economic efficiency and not distribution, they show that our approach utilizing innovation policy to reach dual economic and social policy goals has potential for success.
This article challenges the long-standing emphasis in the developmental state literature on the powerful pilot agency as an essential component of industrialization. Although a pilot agency may be ...able to facilitate growth in mature industries, we argue that policy makers seeking to promote rapid innovation-based competition must instead rely on continuous, radical policy innovation. We argue that this kind of experimentation is more likely to occur at the periphery of the public sector, in agencies with few hard resources and limited political prestige. In addition to providing a novel interpretation of how states enter new, high-technology markets, we explain why some successful countries become less innovative over time. As agencies successfully introduce radical policy innovations, their higher profile exposes them to greater political interference and reduces their entrepreneurial capacity. The argument is supported by within-case analysis of two historically low-technology economies that successfully promoted rapid innovation-based growth, Finland and Israel.
The rise of globally fragmented production since the 1980s encouraged economic regions to specialise in narrow slices of the value chain, making the benefits from local agglomeration no longer ...certain. Nonetheless, locally integrated production districts continue to thrive. Locally integrated industrial districts have proven sustainable in times of both increasing and decreasing fragmentation of production. Drawing upon insights from three schools - the Markusian logic of multiple district models, strategic coupling and the production of semi-public goods - this article uses a two-staged case-study design to explore the conditions under which locally integrated production districts continue to thrive in the global economy.
PDF
