Access to, and the cost of, mainstream financial services act as a barrier to financial inclusion for many in the developing world. The convergence of banking services with mobile technologies means however that users are able to conduct banking services at any place and at any time through...

This chapter explores the on-going development of a global digital economy through a case-study analysis of its impact on and prospects in South Africa. It argues that four factors are key to understanding the impact of the digital economy on a developing country: (1) the level of technology,...

Discussion paper 2002 is combination of six papers prepared for the International Workshop on The Information Revolution and Economic and Social Exclusion in Developing Countries. These papers are the outcomes of two major themes set for the workshop: "The Developments of Access and Effective...

This paper examines the development of the Chinese electronics and information industry (IT) during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, aimed to explain, from the perspective of endogenous factors, how a less developed economy gets access to the so called information revolution in a...

Two of the key characteristics defining this historical period are the twin concepts of globalization and the information economy. This transformation - which embodies social, economic, political, technical and cultural processes - is affecting nearly all of the world's people and economies and...

Technological change is a vital human activity that interacts with geographic factors and environment. The purpose of the study here is to analyse the relationship between geo-climate zones of the globe and technological outputs in order to detect favourable areas that spur higher technological...

An interesting problem in the economics of innovation and strategic management of labs is to explain the drivers of breakthroughs and paradigm shifts in science. This study confronts the issue by analysing a main case study the technological determinant of the discovery of quasi-periodic...

In this paper we analyse economic development through the lenses of a newly developed index the structural modernization index. This index combines two dimensions that have been widely invoked as prime drivers of economic development namely, structural change and technological catch up. For each...

Using Dutch data we empirically investigate how financing and innovation vary across firm characteristics. We find that when firms face financial constraints, debt financing and innovation choices are not independent of firm characteristics, and RD slows down. In the absence of financial...

This paper reviews the existing evidence regarding the effects of technological andnon-technological innovations on the productivity of firms and the existence ofpossible complementarities between these different forms of innovation.