In this paper we analyze whether and how “research” and “development” subsidies influence private R&D activity. Our empirical results show that “research” subsidies stimulate R&D spending within firms while “development” subsidies substitute such spending. At the theoretical...

This paper discusses the role of knowledge, technology and innovation in economic growth within the context of the “Green roads to growth” project. It summarizes the current state of the art in this area, illustrates this with selected graphs and tables based on published statistics and...

Why do some countries grow much faster, and have much better trade performance, than other countries? What are the crucial factors behind such differences, and what can governments do in order to improve the relative position of their economies? This paper outlines a synthetic framework, based...

This paper addresses one of the oldest and most controversial issues in economics: Why do some countries succeed in catching up, while others fall behind? In recent years the quality and availability of data on different aspects of development have improved a lot. Attempting to exploit this...

This paper discusses notions of theory in relation to evolutionary understandings of innovation. It starts by empirically demonstrating the relevance of evolutionary perspectives – broadly defined – for understanding the “basics of what’s going on” in the economic sphere when it comes...

The scholarly literature on innovation was for a long time not very voluminous. But as shown in the paper, this is now rapidly changing. New journals, professional associations and organizational units within universities focusing on innovation have also been formed. This paper explores the...

Specialization in high-tech products is frequently used to capture technology intensity of exports. The literature suggests that developing countries are increasingly becoming exporters of high-tech products, and some may even be among the most deeply specialized countries in the field of...

The analysis addresses path dependency by studying development in industrial structure in Norway over time, and relates types of changes in firms to innovation activities in the firms as identified by the Norwegian innovation survey. A typology of changes is developed on the basis of matched...