The Art Of Economic Catch Up

A highly original book that provides policy solutions for development challenges, framing them with insightful and inventive allegories.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

Together these countries pioneered new technologies that have made them ever richer.

After the miraculous economic growth known as the Beijing Consensus, China is now facing a slowdown. The attention has moved to the issue of the middle income trap. This book deals with this interesting issue in the context of China. It also discusses China's limitations and future prospects, especially after the rise of a new cold war between China and the US, namely the question of whether China would fall into another trap called the Thucydides trap, or conflict with the existing hegemon as a rising power. In sum, this book plays around three key terms, namely, the Beijing Consensus, the Middle Income Trap, and the Thucydides trap, and applies a Schumpeterian approach to these concepts. It also conducts a comparative analysis that examines China from an economic catch-up perspective. An economic catch-up starts from learning and imitating a forerunner, but finishing the race successfully requires taking a different path along the road. This act is also known as leapfrogging, which implies a latecomer doing something different from, and often ahead of, a forerunner. Technological leapfrogging may lead to technological catch-up, which means reducing the technological gap, and then finally to economic catch-up in living standards (per capita income) and economic size (GDP: economic power). This linkage from technological leapfrogging and catch-up to economic catch-up corresponds exactly with a similar linkage from the Beijing Consensus to escaping (or not) the middle income and the Thucydides traps. One conclusion from this book is that China's successful rise as a global industrial power has been due to its strategy of technological leapfrogging, which has enabled China to move beyond the middle income trap and possibly the Thucydides trap, although at a slower speed.

Catch-Up Industrialization is an innovative examination of how the political ideology of 'developmentalism' has driven East Asian economic growth. The author considers innovative production and management techniques, the patterns of industrial relations, and the way education shapes the workforce, using this information to assess late 20th century East Asian economic development based on economic liberalization and the rapid diffusion of information technology.The term 'catch-up' links developing and developed countries, and defines the socioeconomic mindset common to high-growth societies of Asia. The author's argument differs from neoclassical approaches emphasizing the workings of the market, statist ones emphasizing policy rather than private initiatives, business studies lacking macroeconomic and global perspectives, work by development economists based on agriculture, and World BankIMF studies that lack socio-cultural and historical understanding.

Presents the evolutionary perspective of the economy as perpetually moving, driven by innovation, and the empirical research this has guided.

This volume brings together selected papers from the 17th EBES Conference, organized in Venice in winter 2015. The theoretical and empirical papers present the latest research in diverse areas of business, economics, and finance from many different regions. They chiefly focus on the interactions between economic development, entrepreneurship and financial institutions, especially putting the spotlight on cross-country evidence. Topics range from women’s entrepreneurship and economic regulation, to sustainability and climate change. This book provides researchers, professionals, and students a great opportunity to catch up on the latest studies in different fields and empirical findings on many countries and regions.

This book is about the evolution of developing countries in the world economy situated in its wider historical context, spanning centuries, but with a focus on the period since the mid-twentieth century. It traces the rise and 'catch up' of the developing world and the shift in the balance of power in the world economy.