This book develops and articulates a new perspective on the relationship between natural resources and development by foregrounding issues of innovation, knowledge, and industrial dynamics. Despite growing academic attention to the relationship between economic development and natural resources in social sciences, the issue has received rather limited attention in the field of Innovation Studies. This is problematic given the centrality of innovation and technological change for growth and development. Against that background, this book makes three contributions. Firstly, it summarizes and synthesizes existing insights about learning and innovation in Natural Resource Based Industries. Secondly, it develops new insights based on original research work. Thirdly, it distils and explains the remaining research challenges in the field. Containing important insights for researchers, businesses, and policymakers, this book will be useful to all those with an interest in navigating a natural resource based development pathway. This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation and Development.

Economic diversification remains at the top of the agenda for hundreds of regions around the world. From the single commodity economies of African countries and the Caribbean, to the many single industry regions of Europe and North America, as well as the oil and gas rich but volatile hydrocarbon economies. Economic diversification policies have been around for almost a century with varying degrees of success and failure. Economic Diversification Policies in Natural Resource Rich Economies takes a special interest in the policy experiences of a set of different countries that have extractive industries representing significant drivers of their economies and subsequently are significant contributors to government revenues. It explores twelve cases including upper-middle to high income economies such as Canada, Australia, Iceland and Norway, emerging economies such as Latin America, the GCC (Saudi and UAE), Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Russia, as well as the developing economy of Uganda. Each chapter provides a review of economic diversification experiences including policy environment, diversification strategies, desired outcomes, the role of government, and a critical evaluation of achievements. This book is suitable for those who study environmental economics, development economics and resource management.

The concept of National Innovation Systems is well established in academic research and enthusiastically adopted by policymakers. Yet there are relatively few in-depth studies of individual national innovation systems. This book provides just that, a model for the application of the concept to an individual economy. Leading scholars provide a detailed analysis of the particular circumstances of Norway - a high income, high productivity, resource rich economy, with relatively modest investment in R&D, and a remarkable track record of social equity. The authors argue that investment in human capital may be more significant than any formula for R&D investment. The book includes contributions from historians, economists, and political scientists, and offers an unparalleled account of the development of one of the world's most successful economies. It will be essential reading fro academics and policymakers concerned with innovation and growth.

This book rejects the idea that natural resource industries are doomed to slow growth. Rather, it examines the case of Norway to demonstrate that such industries can prove highly innovative and dynamic. Here, the case is compellingly made that a key empirical problem with the popular ‘resource curse’ argument is that some of the richest countries in the world – namely Norway, Sweden, Canada and Australia – have all developed fast-growing economies based on natural resources. Analysis of innovation and knowledge development in natural resource industries reveal important new insights about the role of learning and innovation. These insights are key to understanding variances in growth levels between natural resource-based economies. Ranestad illustrates how Norway’s high economic performance is built on knowledge-based natural resource industries. While Norwegian industries may have originated because of foreign technology and expertise, they thrived due to further developments carried out by organisations within Norway. Ranestad looks at how these developments were possible due to the country’s high level of human capital, capacity for knowledge absorption and ability to adapt to new global technological and economic circumstances.

This volume brings together international experts in economics, sociology and natural resource management to examine the links among property rights, collective action and technological change for a variety of technologies across a range of community contexts in the developing world., Readership: undergraduate; postgraduate; research, professional

This book surveys major economic issues in the development of countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since World War II. It presents a framework of analysis highlighting underlying continuities in the region's approach to issues of growth, management of oil and natural resources, post-conflict environments, progress in trade liberalization and regional integration, the use of industrial policy, labor market adjustment and unemployment, educational attainment and poverty incidence. At the same time, this book focuses on emerging differences across countries in the region in the prevailing approach to addressing such challenges most notably between the economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council and other MENA countries.This book also incorporates a discussion of tools and methods used by development practitioners and briefly examines issues of aid effectiveness. The approach used is intended to appeal to a wide audience including students of economic development, political scientists and development practitioners.

"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--