Catching Up And Falling Behind

In this collection of essays David A Dyker explores some of the most difficult and fascinating aspects of the process of transition from autocratic ?real socialism? to a capitalism that is sometimes democratic, sometimes authoritarian. The stress is on the economic dimension of transformation, but the author sets the economic drama firmly within a political economy framework and a historical perspective. Trends in key economic variables are analysed against the background of the struggle between different social and political groups for power and command over resources. While the book pays due attention to topical issues like EU enlargement, the underlying perspective is a long-term one. Transition is viewed not as a set of once-and-for-all institutional changes or a process of short-term stabilisation, but as a historic opportunity to solve the inherited problem of poverty and underdevelopment in Central-East Europe and the former Soviet Union. The book ends with a critical assessment of how economics, as a discipline, has coped with the challenge of that historic opportunity.

The advancement of a nation from poverty to prosperity is not a technical process but a great transformation. At the center of this change are two driving forces _ emotion, which is referred to as aspiration, anxiety, and sense of responsibility; and e

For most countries, economic development involves a process of 'catching up' with leading countries at the time. This is never achieved solely by physical assets and labour alone: also needed are the accumulation of technological capabilities, educational attainment, entrepreneurship, and the development of the necessary institutional infrastructure. One element of this infrastructure is the regime of intellectual property rights (IPR), particularly patents. Patents may promote innovation and catch up, and they may foster formal technology transfer. Yet they may also prove to be barriers for developing countries that intend to acquire technologies through imitation and reverse engineering. The current move to harmonize the IPR system internationally, such as the TRIPS agreement, may thus have unexpected consequences for developing countries. This book explores these issues through an in depth study of eleven countries ranging from early developers (the USA, Nordic Countries and Japan), and Post World War 2 countries (Korea, Taiwan, Israel) to more recent emerging economies (Argentina, Brazil, China, India and Thailand). With contributions from international experts on innovation systems, this book will be an invaluable resource for academics and policymakers in the fields of economic development, innovation studies and intellectual property laws.

This book uses a range of S&T and structural indicators to analyse the transfonnation process, in particular the transfonnation of science, technology and industry, in the fonner communist countries. The book originates from a sense of the tremendous need for quantitative indicators for assessing trends and perfonnance in the post-socialist economies. S&T systems in the region have passed through the first phase of rapid deterioration, or as it is called by some analysts 'implosion'. After ten years of transfonnation we are witnessing a process of increasing differentiation of these countries in tenns of general patterns of growth and structural change, as well as specific lines of restructuring in their S&T systems. The question of sources of growth - or indeed of stagnation - is an increasingly urgent one, from both the policy and academic perspectives. In that context there is a pressing need for in-depth assessment of restructuring patterns in science, technology and industry in the region, as a basis for understanding how restructuring in S&T is linked to industrial restructuring, and to general economic and social transfonnation. As the contributions to this volume show, there is now a critical mass of quantitative data across the post-socialist countries which deserves to be studied more thoroughly in a comparative manner. The changes of the last ten years have produced varying patterns of adjustment which are now clearly visible in S&T and structural indicators.

A new framework for measuring the evolution of human development and wellbeing in the modern world.

The current growth path in sub-Saharan Africa is not following the Lewis model where labour moves from low-productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing. Instead, it is moving directly to inappropriate (import and labour-saving) methods. This book seeks to show how this distorted growth process leaves out the major resource of these countries – labour – and ends up creating unstable employment and underemployment, leading to inequality and poverty. In this way it demonstrates how the entire growth process may be rendered unstable and unsustainable. Sustainable Growth in the African Economy considers whether the relatively rapid growth of recent years can be maintained or improved upon, with a focus on the process of industrialisation. Basing itself on a well-known dual-economy model, the proposed book focuses on several major problems of industrialisation, which has long been seen as the means of structural change in an economy which begins from a low income level. The book considers how the future trajectory of sub-Saharan Africa compares to recent success stories on other continents, and explains how factors such as rapid population growth and capital and import-intensive technology in manufacturing could foreshadow future social and political problems. This book will be essential reading to students and policymakers who are concerned with the existing pattern of African growth.