Institutions Innovation And Industrialization

This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

This title was first published in 2002. Bringing together a wide range of theoretical and empirical case studies from Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey, China, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland, South Africa, Japan, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, this book addresses these neglected issues, in particular, contemplating the vitally important nexus between industry, environment and the knowledge economy.Throughout the book, four key themes and issues are explored: institution building strategies; agglomeration as territorial context; sustainable industrial-environmental processes and policy initiatives; globalization, learning and industrial location dynamics. The book concludes with an outline of future research directions within the paradigm.

Existing accounts of East Asia’s meteoric growth and structural change has either been explained as one dictated essentially by markets with strong macroeconomic fundamentals, or a consequence of proactive governments. This book departs from such a dichotomy by examining inductively the drivers of the experiences. Given the evolutionary treatment of each economic good and service as different, this book examines technological catch up with a strong focus on the industries contributing significantly to the economic growth of the countries selected in Asia. The evidence produced supports the evolutionary logic of macro, meso and micro interactions between several institutions, depending on the actors involved, structural location and typology of taxonomies and trajectories. The book carefully picks out experiences from the populous economies of China, India and Indonesia, the high income economies of Korea and Taiwan, the middle income economies of Malaysia and Thailand, and the transitional least developed country of Myanmar. Chapters 1-7 of this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy.

What does it take for a society to be able to innovate? The question is crucial today when an increasing share of world patents are taken out by countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, which have limited energy resources and cultures very different from those in the West. However, most previous studies of the beginnings of industrialization have focused on the resources and institutions of Britain alone. As a result, they have missed the lessons to be learned from casting the net more widely so as to examine all regions of the North-Atlantic community. This book pinpoints the surprising differences between innovating and non-innovating regions. Protection of property rights, a practical ideology and abundant resources were not sufficient to spark accelerated innovation. The key to the Industrial Revolution, this study shows through case studies and rigorous verification, was the effect of expanding social networks on people’s willingness to cooperate. Language standardization permitted the widening of circles of cooperation to encompass individuals with increasingly different sets of knowledge. The result was an unprecedented burst of what some linguists have called “double-scope blending” – the integration of hitherto unrelated concepts to create something new. These findings have important implications for corporate and government policy.

Based on the paradigms of economics and management, inspired by the history of technology and the sociology of technological change, the concepts of shared inventions and competitive innovations make it possible to analyze the industrialization of the world in a fresh and efficient way. As a new approach, shared inventions are classified in this book as a set of existing knowledge thats often associated with the rediscovery of old techniques. Determining capitalized and collective intelligence, this knowledge and reinvention allows us to create inventions which will be shared, first in their construction, then in their use. Another new approach is that these competitive innovations are defined in World Industrialization by associations of experiences of competitively-motivated actors – actors seeking to complement existing techniques by increasing their competitive power. These shared inventions and competitive innovations will also be defined by trajectories identifying their modes of creation, enabling us to overcome the peculiarities of these actions and competitions. This book also highlights four key areas in global industrialization: the emergence of machinism with the defense of Arts and Crafts from 1698–1760; the changes the Industrial Revolution wrought in developed nations from 1760–1850; the link between technology and social relations within modern companies from 1850–1914; and, from 1914 onwards, the birth of extended machinism, its world wars and its global crises.

This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolu­tion, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wear­able sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manu­facturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individu­als. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frame­works that advance progress.