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.

The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society describes the discontinuities that are changing the structure and the meaning of economy, politics, and society. Major discontinuities exist in four areas: the knowledge technologies; changes in the world's economy; a society of organizations; and the knowledge society. This book is organized into four parts encompassing 17 chapters. Each part represents the four areas of discontinuities. Part I highlights the growth in major industries and businesses, along with economic policies related to tax incentives. Part II looks into the status of the global economy, the disparity between the rich and poor countries, and the concepts and application of the economic theory demonstrating a closed economy controlled from within by national, monetary, credit, and tax policies. Part III examines the changes in the political matrix of social and economic life. This part deals particularly with the theory of pluralism and organizations, as well as the creation of socio-political reality. Part IV focuses on the changes in the cost center and the crucial resource of the economy. Knowledge changes involve changes in labor forces and work. This book will prove useful to economists, public servants, sociologists, and researchers.

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

Is the 'natural resource curse' destiny? Are different ways to link natural resources and economic development? Using two particular regions as case studies, this edited collection examines the divergent development paths of natural resource rich countries over the past two centuries. Bolivia, Chile and Peru are neighbour states with a common history and are globally known by their mining endowments. Norway and Sweden have also a strong common history, and different natural resource endowments (forestry, mining and fishing) are essential to understand their current economic success. By comparing natural resource management in the long run in these two divergent regions, this book can help rethink how developing countries can better take advantage of their natural resource endowments. Specifically, the book examines the interaction between natural resources and different key determinants of long-term development: trade, fiscal policy, sustainability, human capital accumulation and business strategies.

Economies around the world have arrived at a critical juncture: to continue to grow fuelled by fossil fuels and exacerbate climate change, or to move towards more sustainable, greener, growth. Choosing the latter is shown to help address climate change, as well as present new economic opportunities. This Handbook provides a deeper understanding of the concept of green growth, and highlights key lessons from the experience of green transformations across the world following a decade of ambitious stimulus packages and green reforms.

Maps capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products. Through the graphical representation of the "Product Space," the authors are able to identify each country's "adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth. In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling. Using innovative visualizations, the book locates each country in the product space, provides complexity and growth potential rankings for 128 countries, and offers individual country pages with detailed information about a country's current capabilities and its diversification options. The maps and visualizations included in the Atlas can be used to find more viable paths to greater productive knowledge and prosperity.

'Natural Resources: Neither Course nor Destiny' brings together a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from econometric analyses of economic growth to historical studies of successful development experiences in countries with abundant natural resources. The evidence suggests that natural resources are neither a curse nor destiny. Natural resources can actually spur economic development when combined with the accumulation of knowledge for economic innovation. Furthermore, natural resource abundance need not be the only determinant of the structure of trade in developing countries. In fact, the accumulation of knowledge, infrastructure, and the quality of governance all seem to determine not only what countries produce and export, but also how firms and workers produce any good.