The unintended economic effect on society as result of individual behaviour — Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of economic progress in the eighteenth century — had its equivalent in technological progress. In the nineteenth century, again individual behaviour with its Acts of Innovation...

This paper analyzes the link between natural resources abundance, the quality of learning institutions and retardation in technology adoption. We offer a model in which human capital is technology specific and that learning to master the technology is costly. Market failure in the human capital...

This paper works out some of the basic properties of an economy with energy as a factor of production. The economy now consists of streams of energy conversions that direct energy to the production of goods and services. The focus on energy generates a variety of insights. It yields a new...

Past study of the diffusion of pervasive technologies, such as the electric motor, has failed to take into account the varied technological challenges in their application. In a careful examination of the adoption patterns of the electric motor in three industries, automobile manufacture,...

Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few jobs. We use data for seven aggregated sectors...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in per-capita income levels and growth rates is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Ultra-broadband diffusion, information technology (IT) advances and the market mass decreasing costs are determining a growing adoption of processing and storage resources at the edge of current telecom networks that, ultimately, are the end-users. The number of devices connected to the network...

Communication is increasingly at the center of human activity and crucial to the success of individual professionals and their organizations. Moreover, communication in various organizations (companies, schools, etc.) encompasses all the means, both formal and informal, by which information is...

This article presents new international estimates of human capital for the period 1970–2003. The new latent index is used to re-examine the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) model of technology diffusion in a horse-race with the competing indicators of Barro and Lee (2010) and Hanushek and Wößmann...