Today Taiwan is recognized as the largest center of fabless integrated circuit (IC) design firms (firms which design but do not fabricate chips) after the United States, while Hong Kong is a bit player in this global industry. Fifteen years ago things looked quite different. At that time, Hong...

Semiconductors represent a major building block of high-tech industry. This chapter analyzes the trajectory of China's rapidly growing semiconductor sector, focusing on the interplay among global technology developments, Chinese government policy, and three groups of firms: purely domestic...

This chapter argues that the global information technology (IT) industry has become increasingly modularized through the digitization of information and that this modularization manifests itself in the reorganization and relocation of the IT industry. This chapter has three main points. First,...

This chapter considers the development of four important Taiwanese industrial clusters: bicycles, machine tools, integrated circuits (ICs), and information and communication technologies (ICT) hardware. Three of these clusters grew out of the networked production of Taiwan's rural...

This chapter argues that the some of institutional arrangements that have propelled China out of poverty are now major obstacles to future technological and economic development. The two principal such obstacles are China's system of extreme financial repression supporting its large state-owned...

In China, entrepreneurs hailing from ethnic Chinese transnational technology networks have linked up with global capital to create hybrid firms that combine relatively efficient foreign financing with a strategic commitment to intensive utilisation of domestic resources to create their core...

Using China's semiconductor design industry as a case, this article examines the claims made by global production network (GPN) and transnational technology community (TTC) scholars that transnational networks are driving technological development in emerging economies. Due to co-ethnic...

This chapter assesses the benefits and dangers of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), the agreement between Mainland China and Taiwan, to Taiwan's growth and prosperity. The KMT have oversold the benefits of ECFA whereas the DPP and others within the green camp have exaggerated...

This paper evaluates the reasons behind the innovation successes and failures in the Taiwanese electronics industry by comparing the innovation outcomes for three products: CMOS logic, DRAM and AMLCD. The determining factors of success and failure are whether the products in which Taiwanese...