The current paradigm shift in the world economy is challenging the traditional competitiveness and growth theories with their few explanatory variables. This book offers a more holistic framework to synthesise the key findings of the various branches of competitiveness and growth research. The author illustrates this framework with a new long wave theory of socio-economic development. This theory emphasises the competitiveness and growth benefits of rapid structural adjustment in the rapidly changing techno-economic environment. Based on thorough analysis the author argues that both markets and governments have become less efficient due to the current transformation of the world economy. His empirical data from 22 OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s illustrates that efficiency and growth-oriented governments have significantly contributed to their countries' economic success. National Competitiveness and Economic Growth will furnish its readers with a better understanding of the interdependencies of many important but seemingly unrelated aspects of modern economies and societies, for example the dynamics of business and technology, and cultural and institutional change. It will appeal to economists, business professionals and policymakers with a special interest in the competitiveness and growth of firms and national economies as well as the long-term development of socio-economic systems.

Economic growth of a country depends on its industries. The focus of modern growth theory is basically macroeconomics, although neoclassical models use competitive markets and the optimization behavior of households and firms in general equilibrium framework. The emphasis here is on industry growth, where the microfoundations of industry are analyzed in terms of economic efficiency. The various linkages which link firm growth with the industry growth are discerned here under various market structures both competitive and monopolistic. The role of information in facilitating market signals and allowing the adoption of new processes has been especially emphasized in this volume. Many issues of market failure and the suboptimality of competitive equilibria are due to incomplete and imperfect information structures and we need a comprehensive theory of information structures underlying the process of industry growth and its dynamics. This book will be of interest to economists studying economic and industry growth and innovation.

Globalization and structural adjustment offer many opportunities for export orientated industrialization in developing economies. As a group, competitiveness in the developing countries has improved, but, while East Asian economies have had rapid export growth and technological upgrades, South Asian and African economies have lagged behind. Old structures, institutions, behavioural patterns and public policies are ill-adapted to deal with the challenges posed by technological change and economic liberalization. Consequently there is an urgent need for change in government and private sector attitudes and strategies. This volume seeks to generalise the lessons across developing country and enterprise cases, and sheds light on which trade and industrial strategies and instruments work best, and which do not work, in relation to manufacturing competitiveness.

This book examines the life and work of Ajit Singh (1940-2015), a leading radical post-Keynesian applied economist who made major contributions to the policy-oriented study of both developed and developing economies, and was a key figure in the life and evolution of the Cambridge Faculty of Economics. Unorthodox, outspoken, and invariably rigorous, Ajit Singh made highly significant contributions to industrial economics, corporate governance and finance, and stock markets – developing empirically sound refutations of neoclassical tenets. He was much respected for his challenges both to orthodox economics, and to the one-size-fits-all free-market policy prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions in relation to late-industrialising developing economies. Throughout his career, Ajit remained an analyst and apostle of State-enabled accelerated industrialisation as the key to transformative development in the post-colonial Global South. The author traces Ajit Singh’s radical perspectives to their roots in the early post-colonial nationalist societal aspirations for self-determination and autonomous and rapid egalitarian development – whether in his native Punjab, India, or the third world – and further explores the nuanced interface between Ajit’s simultaneous affinity, seemingly paradoxical, both with socialism and Sikhism. This intellectual biography will appeal to students and researchers in Development Economics, History of Economic Thought, Development Studies, and Post-Keynesian Economics, as well as to policy makers and development practitioners in the fields of industrialisation, development and finance within the strategic framework of contemporary globalisation.