In the past two decades, many industrial districts have become more specialized in particular stages of production. Two related processes contribute to this specialization: globalization and fragmentation of production. Hence, this article asks the following question: Can an industry centered on...

While the productivity paradox has been largely resolved, debate persists about the impacts of information and communications technologies on productivity, particularly as regards broadband Internet connections. To date, the bulk of the literature has not addressed the impacts of broadband...

Photovoltaic (PV) technologies have demonstrated significant price reductions, but large-scale global application of PV requires further technology improvements and cost reductions along the value chain. We survey policies in Germany and China and the industrial actors they can encourage to...

Outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging countries to relatively low-wage countries has raised important questions about its impact on domestic technological development because of the small gap in terms of a technological lead. This paper develops hypotheses linking the impact of...

This paper addresses the question: Under what conditions will the recent rapid technical change in products in the machine tool sector increase the technological gap between the developed countries and the NICs? The technical change referred to is the trend towards the substitution of standard...

This short essay first reviews the pioneers of energy transition research both in terms of data as well as theories. Three major insights that have emerged from this nascent research fields are summarized highlighting the importance of energy end-use and services, the lengthy process of...

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...

In this paper, we propose that historically generated institutions and persistent pattern of human capital formation conditions the emergent systems of innovation in Africa. These effectively determine the development trajectory of the region. We advance the notion of dynamic and non-dynamic...

It is now fairly well established both in theory and practice that if industrial R&D is left entirely in the hands of private sector enterprises there will be under investments. The desire to under invest is proportional to the size of the spill-over gap. In order to correct for these, public...