The ‘technological’ dimension of structural change under market integration

This paper explores the relationships between technological and productive structures. It attempts to show that, during market integration processes, when changes in productive structures are expected, the changes in national technological specialization are less linked to technological cumulativeness and opportunity. The paper uses patent data for 15 European, 6 Asian and 4 Latin American countries. It concludes that market integration is associated with elevated rhythms of catching up and converging, but also with higher levels of concentration of technological structures. Besides that, there is evidence that the concentration of innovative efforts is not always persistent. A reasonable part of the newly built competences is not the consequence of cumulative processes; therefore, there are reasons to think that quite a large part of mobility is strongly associated with productive structural change.