Explaining divergence in catching-up in pharma between India and Brazil using the NSI framework

Since the mid-twentieth century, the national objective of India and Brazil has been to develop industrial capabilities in essential sectors such as pharmaceuticals. At the outset they shared some common features: a considerable period of lax intellectual property rights regimes, a large internal market and a reasonably strong cadre of scientists and engineers. However, over sixty years, India has had much more success in building indigenous capabilities in pharmaceuticals than Brazil, at least to date. Why? In exploring the answer to this question we show that in both countries the design of State policy played a crucial role and the endogenous responses in the national system of innovation consisted of two parts. On the one hand, most of the time, the predicted and desired outcome was partially realized and on the other hand, there were invariably, other unpredicted responses that emerged. The latter unexpected elements, which were specific to the two countries, pushed them along distinctive trajectories.     

Putting higher education in its place in (East Asian) political economy

ABSTRACT

This article relates changes in higher education (HE) and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states (DSs) in the region. The DS is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of DSs from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge-intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state's continuing role in HE and its internationalisation in the region.     

ICT access: Testing for convergence across countries

Our objectives for this article are twofold: first, to examine the convergence of nations with regard to ICT access; and second, to see whether countries in the same continental region (South and East Asia, West and Middle East Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania) or having same initial ICT access have coalesced into groups. We constructed an ICT access index using three indicators (mobile phone, Internet, and broadband use per 100 population) for a sample of 198 nations for the 16-year period from 2000 to 2015. Results show that digital divide has declined in relative terms, but not in absolute terms. The countries, starting at lower ICT levels, are not adopting ICT faster than the leaders. Continental region-wise analysis also shows that the catch-up is maximum for already developed countries, and minimum for countries in African and Oceania continental regions.     

技术赶超条件下对外贸易对收入分配的影响研究

在传统的李嘉图模型和H-O模型的基础上,通过引入技术赶超的概念,建立一个贸易和收入分配的一般均衡模型,从技术赶超的角度解释对外贸易对收入差距的影响机制。通过实证检验发现我国贸易结构的变化扩大了收入差距,这种结构变化主要是通过技术赶超实现的,技能劳动力需求的增长和地区间发展的不平衡等因素也对我国收入差距扩大化产生一定的影响。     

Public research institutions and economic catch-up

Public research institutions, often but not always connected with universities, have been in the past important elements of the structures supporting economic catch-up. Recent changes in the international economic environment, and the growing scientific basis for contemporary technologies, will make those institutions even more important in the future. Universities and public labs have contributed to the development of technological capabilities in different forms across countries and economic sectors. In contrast with current emphasis on university-based embryonic inventions and fundamental research, effective research programs have predominantly occurred in the application-oriented sciences and engineering, and have been oriented towards problem-solving, and the advancement of technologies of interest to a well-defined user-community.     

Knowledge flows in the solar photovoltaic industry: Insights from patenting by Taiwan, Korea, and China

In this paper we extend work previously undertaken in industries such as semiconductor and flat panel displays to investigate knowledge flows from advanced countries (US, Japan and Europe) to catch-up follower countries (Taiwan, Korea and China), this time in the emergent solar photovoltaic industry. The solar photovoltaic industry is of particular interest in that it is poised between exploitation of first generation (crystalline silicon technologies) and new thin film and organic compound technologies, thus providing distinct sources of knowledge flow as measured by patent citations and linkage. For this study, we deploy a new database of 19,105 solar photovoltaic patents taken out by Taiwan, Korea and China at the USPTO over the 24 years 1984-2008, and analyse the knowledge flows revealed in these patents using a set of 12 International Patent Classification technology categories that we constructed. We demonstrate commonalities in patterns of knowledge flow between solar photovoltaic and earlier industries, but also suggestive differences, such as rising dependence of the catch-up countries on their own intra-national knowledge generation and flow, indicating their shift from imitation to innovation.     

毛泽东"赶超"战略探析

赶超战略是后发式发展中国家所普遍采用的一种社会发展战略。20世纪五六十年代,毛泽东确立了其有中国特色的赶超战略体系,不但对赶超目标与赶超重点进行了确立,而且进一步制定了赶超政策,挖掘了赶超源泉。毛泽东“赶超战略”的形成有深刻的国际国内因素的影响,其对中国社会发展既有积极的借鉴价值,又有消极的影响,对其评价要客观公正。     

Shaping selection environments for industrial catch-up and sustainability transitions: A systemic perspective on endogenizing windows of opportunity

Transitioning economic sectors towards more sustainable futures is a major global challenge, in particular for non-OECD countries. Policymakers in these countries are confronted with a double challenge: how to implement cleaner technologies and infrastructures while at the same time promoting rapid industrial development. In catch-up studies, this trade-off has been increasingly interpreted as providing windows of opportunity for gaining strong leadership in new generations of cleantech industries. In this paper, we maintain that in order to specify how these windows of opportunity can be endogenized, a deeper understanding is needed about whether, how and by whom the directionality of innovation systems can be influenced. For this purpose, we propose an analytical approach that draws on the technological innovation system framework extending the current understanding of directionality in two ways: first, we complement the prevalent top-down perspective with a bottom-up view exemplified by the institutional entrepreneurship literature. Second, we posit that the focus has to be shifted from the manufacturing of single technologies to the transformation of entire socio-technical systems. The presented framework is validated by a case study on recent shifts in the dominant technology in China’s urban water management sector. Major changes in the country’s sectoral selection environment led membrane bioreactor technology to become the dominant design in urban water management – a development that is unmatched in any other country in the world. Owing to these transformations, China’s technology firms outcompete multinational players and therefore they show strong potentials for industrial leapfrogging. However, although the promise to solve environmental problems played a decisive role in the shaping of the selection environment, it remains unclear whether the observed transformation leads the way to a more sustainable sector structure in the longer run. The case, however, still enables us to specify how windows of opportunity can be endogenized through the interplay of different actors trying to shape different layers of the selection environment in a specific sector.     

The long march to catch-up: A history-friendly model of China’s mobile communications industry

This paper develops a history-friendly model of the process of catch-up by Chinese firms in the mobile communications industry. It aims to explain how the sectoral environment in terms of segmented markets and generational technological change facilitated the catch-up of domestic firms with respect to foreign multinationals. Segmented markets provided a nurturing environment in peripheral markets for the survival of domestic firms starting with low level capabilities in their infant stage. Generational technological change opened windows of opportunities for domestic firms to catch-up with foreign multinationals in new product segments. Segmented markets and generational technological change allowed domestic firms to leverage their initial advantages in peripheral markets to catch-up in core markets. Counterfactual simulations highlight that the process of catch-up was facilitated by relatedness across technological generations. This paper contributes to the literature on catch-up and industry evolution by illustrating the role of technological change and market regimes in the process of catching-up.