Austria’s transition to a digital economy and society is slower than in other high-income small open European economies. The rate and pace of utilisation of eight main ICT applications shows that Austrian firms follow peer country counterparts with a gap, which has widened in most areas in...

This study tests the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The empirical analysis has three comparative advantages: including emerging and advanced economies, isolating panel variation regarding the link between productivity and exports, and exploiting...

This chapter discusses different approaches pursued to explore three broad questions related to technology diffusion: what general patterns characterize the diffusion of technologies, and how have they changed over time?; what are the key drivers of technology?; and what are the macroeconomic...

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

This paper offers Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a framework for understanding and evaluating Human Resource Development activities in larger organizations, specifically transnational corporations (TNCs). There is a growing literature on international human resource management targeted...

This chapter traces the development of markets for music over the past several centuries. Formally organized music was at first supported primarily by churches and the nobility. Indeed, during the 18th century there was a kind of “arms race” in which noble houses competed for prestige...

This paper analyses the characteristics of firms that operate at the global productivity frontier and their relationship with other firms in the economy, focusing on the diffusion of global productivity gains and the policies that faciliate it. Firms at the global productivity frontier –...

This paper provides new evidence on the main characteristics of laggard firms - firms in the bottom 40% of the productivity distribution - and their potential for productivity growth. It finds that laggards are on average younger and smaller than more productive firms, and matter for aggregate...

In this paper, we aim to bring the debate on the global productivity slowdown – which has largely been conducted from a macroeconomic perspective – to a more micro-level. We show that a particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much a lower productivity growth at...

This paper presents comparative data on innovation in selected climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies in the context of Africa. Such analysis informs policy aimed at encouraging international technology transfer and development of domestic innovation capacities. We present...