This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose (GPTs). They establish an alternative to the standard growth models that use an aggregate production function and then introduce the concept of GPTs, complete with a study of how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis. The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They build non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium models of GPT-driven growth that incorporate a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important but which are excluded from other GPT models in the interests of analytical tractability. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach.

Technological progress is a major factor chaping economic growth. Today's standard of living is a direct result of scientific advances and technical change in the past. Since uncontrolled technological progress has become amenace to our well being and may actually threat our survival, it is necessary to learn to manage technological progress and direct innovative activities in such a manner that both private wants and social needs playa dominant role in determining the rate and direction of technical change. This requires a better understanding of the processes of technical change, of their impact on and interrelationships with economic and social developments and of the means and measures by which both individuals and governments can influence and direct technological progress. To this end, the Ninistry for Research and Technology of the Federal Republ ic of Germany and the National Science Foundation of the Uni ted States of America invited a group of scholars, corporate managers and civil servants to a one week seminar on "Technolo gical Innovation". The seminar took place in April, 1976, in Bonn, Federal Republ ic of Germany. Most papers presented at this meeting were specifically prepared for the seminar. With this volume, they are made available to a larger audience to further stimulate discussion not only among scholars interested in innovation research and technology policy questions but also among managers, union officials, civil ser vants and others directly or indirectly concerned with and affected by technical change.

Innovation is among the most important topics in understanding economic sustained economic growth. Jason Potts argues that the initial stages of innovation require cooperation under uncertainty and draws from insights on the solving of commons problems to shed light on policies and conditions conducive to the creation of new firms and industries. The problems of innovation commons are overcome, Potts shows, when there are governance institutions that incentivize cooperation, thereby facilitating the pooling of distributed information, knowledge, and other inputs. The entrepreneurial discovery of an economic opportunity is thus an emergent institution resulting from the formation of a cooperative group, under conditions of extreme uncertainty, working toward the mutual purpose of opportunity discovery about a nascent technology or new idea. Among the problems commons address are those of the identity; cooperation; consent; monitoring; punishment; and independence. A commons is efficient compared to the creation of alternative economic institutions that involve extensive contracting and networks, private property rights and price signals, or public goods (i.e. firms, markets, and governments). In other words, the origin of innovation is not entrepreneurial action per se, but the creation of a common pool resource from which entrepreneurs can discover opportunities. Potts' framework draws on the evolutionary theory of cooperation and institutional theory of the commons. It also has important implications for understanding the origin of firms and industries, and for the design of innovation policy. Beginning with a discussion of problems of knowledge and coordination as well as their implications for common pool environments, the book then explores instances of innovation commons and the lifecycle of innovation, including increased institutionalization and rigidness. Potts also discusses the possible implications of the commons framework for policies to sustain innovation dynamics.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of several federal agencies responsible for protecting Americans against significant risks to human health and the environment. As part of that mission, EPA estimates the nature, magnitude, and likelihood of risks to human health and the environment; identifies the potential regulatory actions that will mitigate those risks and protect public health1 and the environment; and uses that information to decide on appropriate regulatory action. Uncertainties, both qualitative and quantitative, in the data and analyses on which these decisions are based enter into the process at each step. As a result, the informed identification and use of the uncertainties inherent in the process is an essential feature of environmental decision making. EPA requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convene a committee to provide guidance to its decision makers and their partners in states and localities on approaches to managing risk in different contexts when uncertainty is present. It also sought guidance on how information on uncertainty should be presented to help risk managers make sound decisions and to increase transparency in its communications with the public about those decisions. Given that its charge is not limited to human health risk assessment and includes broad questions about managing risks and decision making, in this report the committee examines the analysis of uncertainty in those other areas in addition to human health risks. Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty explains the statement of task and summarizes the findings of the committee.