In this paper, we present calculations of the economic gains in terms of reduced costs by exploiting scale-economies in dairy production in Norway, and the effect this would have had on the number of farms. We also explore whether or not optimal scale and unexploited scale-economies change over time due to scale-augmenting technical change. The analysis is based on homothetic cost functions est...

Engineers, Innovative Capacity and Development in the Americas Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in particular, the poor performance of Latin A...

This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz’s seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three complementary but different approaches are useful in the study of a range of current research areas– though the...

This paper examines the role of the global institutional frameworks on the national processes of innovation diffusion. we focus on the influence of the Kyoto mechanisms on the diffusion of renewable energy technologies in the BRICS countries i.e. Brazil, China India, Russia and South Africa. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the Kyoto Mechanisms may support...

The labour productivity impact of innovation of manufacturing firms in Bangladesh and Pakistan, a highly neglected region for such studies compared with the developed world, is studied in this paper by using World Bank Enterprise Survey data conducted in 2006. To achieve this end, we apply the Cobb-Douglas production function, augmented with innovation-related (and other expected sources of pro...

We apply various re nements of survival regression to assess the results of some basic speci cations based on product life cycle theory for the case of a data set of the German automobile industry. The methods applied pay attention to biases in the coe cient estimates and the standard errors, the discrete nature of the duration data and the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Robust estimatio...

This paper presents a novel stylized fact and analyzes its contribution to the skill bias of technical change in U.S. manufacturing. The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This finding points towards an intersectoral technology-skill complementarity (ITSC). Together with input-output linkages, the observe...

We endogenize total factor productivity in a neoclassical model with increasing returns to scale. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive …rms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive …rms operate as well. This results in lower average …rm productivity and total factor pr...

In a multi-industry growth model, firms require external funds to conduct productivityenhancing R&D, and are limited by financing constraints. The cost of research differs across industries, so financing constraints hinder productivity growth in some industries more than in others. Equilibrium industry dynamics map into a differences-indifferences regression specification where industry growth ...

This paper begins with a discussion of the role played by upgrading in the promotion of sustainable growth. Upgrading is discussed in two different contexts, that of industrial clusters and that of global value chains (GVCs). Drawing on global and African experiences, the paper addresses the upgrading agenda required to enable dynamic clusters to meet both domestic needs and progressively also ...