Cross-country technology adoption: making the theories face the facts

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world's leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for the period 1788-2001. We document the common patterns observed in the diffusion of this broad range of technologies.Our results suggest a pattern of trickle-down diffusion that is remarkably robust across technologies. Most of the technologies that we consider originate in advanced economies and are adopted there first. Subsequently, they trickle down to countries that lag economically. Our panel data analysis indicates that the most important determinants of the speed at which a country adopts technologies are the country's human capital endowment, type of government, degree of openness to trade, and adoption of predecessor technologies. We also find that the overall rate of diffusion has increased markedly since World War II because of the convergence in these variables across countries.

New exports from emerging markets: Do followers benefit from pioneers?

“…4 Another approach, without having rm level data, has been to use aggregate country-level adoption of particular technologies (Comin and Hobijn, 2004), or the country-level discovery of new export products (Hausmann and Rodrik, 2003;Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabasi, and Hausmann, 2007;Klinger and Lederman, 2004) Unlike these macrolevel papers, we use rm-product data trying to understand whether the adoption is a spillover across rms or simply a single rm increasing its size. Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2010) argue that this is a crucial distinction for our understanding of market failures.…”

Trade liberalization, democratization, and technology adoption

“…7 To our knowledge, the widespread perception on the positive role of openness and democracy across countries was not documented (using for instance data on technology adoption) but was rather indirectly inferred from the fact that, everything else equal, open economies and democratic countries tends to be richer than closed economies and autocracies. 8 Comin and Hobijn (2004) that collected data for the pre and post WWII era across 25 major 6 political regimes are investigated accounting for country specific unobserved heterogeneity and waves of technological change using a difference-in-difference framework with country and time fixed effects. As benchmark we use the data on trade openness from Wacziarg and Welch (2008) and the data on democratization from the Polity IV database.…”

Discursive destabilisation of socio-technical regimes: Negative storylines and the discursive vulnerability of historical American railroads

“…Section 3.2 covers the period from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War, during which time the railroad regime collapsed and was replaced with one based on motorised road transport ( Figure 1). [46] and Comin and Hobijn [47].…”