This chapter offers a frame of interpretation for the international patterns of technological innovation and diffusion, and their relations with income growth, in general, but with a particular emphasis on the possible role played by the so-called “globalization” processes of the last couple of decades. It provides a background for the discussion of the role of policies in different countries and different historical periods presented in the chapters that follow. The chapter argues that neither the contemporary evidence nor the theory supports the view that globalization naturally goes hand-in-hand with international convergence: in quite a few cases, the opposite holds. Rather, policy variables continue to be fundamental to the engineering of development processes.
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