catch up cycles and changes in industrial leadership windows of opportunity and responses of firms and countries in the evolution of sectoral systems this study proposes a framework that aims to explain why successive changes in industry leadership called also the catch up cycle occur over time in a sector in catch up cycles latecomer firms and countries emerge as international leaders whereas incumbents lose their previous positions new leaders are then dethroned by newcomers to identify factors at the base of catch up cycles this article adopts a sectoral system framework and identifies windows of opportunity that may emerge during the long run evolution of an industry this study proposes three windows related to the specific dimensions of a sectoral system one dimension is related to changes in knowledge and technology the second dimension pertains to changes in demand and the third includes changes in institutions and public policy the combination of the opening of a window technological demand or institutional policy and the responses of firms and other components of the sectoral system of the latecomer and incumbent countries determines changes in industrial leadership and catch up sectors differ according to the type of windows that may open and the responses of firms and other components of systems empirical evidence of catch up cycles is presented from six sectors namely mobile phones cameras semiconductors steel mid sized jets and wines

tracking distortions in agriculture china and its accession to the world trade organization this article examines the impacts of china s accession to the world trade organization wto on prices in its agricultural sector the analysis uses a new methodology to estimate nominal protection rates in china s agricultural sector before its accession to the wto these new measures account for differences in commodity quality within china and between china and world markets the analysis shows that some of china s agricultural commodities are well above world market prices and others are well below the article also assesses market integration and efficiency in china it finds high degrees of integration between coastal and inland markets and between regional and village markets the remarkable improvements in market performance in recent years mean that if increased imports or exports affect china s domestic price near the border producers throughout most of china will feel the price shifts

upgrading in global value chains lessons from latin american clusters it has been shown that clustering helps local enterprises in industrial districts overcome growth constraints and compete in distant markets in advanced and less developed countries nevertheless recent contributions have stressed that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages and to the role played by global buyers to foster upgrading at cluster levels in this study we contribute to this debate focusing on the analysis of the relationships existing between clustering global value chains upgrading and sectoral patterns of innovation in latin america we find that sectoral specificities matter and influence the mode and the extent of upgrading in clusters integrated in global value chains

explaining the attacker s advantage technological paradigms organizational dynamics and the value network abstract understanding when entrants might have an advantage over an industry s incumbent firms in developing and adopting new technologies is a question which several scholars have explained in terms of technological capabilities or organizational dynamics this paper proposes that the value network the context within which a firm competes and solves customers problems is an important factor affecting whether incumbent or entrant firms will most successfully innovate in a study of technology development in the disk drive industry the authors found that incumbents led the industry in developing and adopting new technologies of every sort identified by earlier scholars at component and architectural levels competency enhancing and competency destroying incremental and radical as long as the technology addressed customers needs within the value network in which the incumbents competed entrants led in developing and adopting technologies which addressed user needs in different emerging value networks it is in these innovations which disrupted established trajectories of technological progress in established markets that attackers proved to have an advantage the rate of improvement in product performance which technologists provide may exceed the rate of improvement demanded in established markets this mismatch between trajectories enables firms entering emerging value networks subsequently to attack the industry s established markets as well

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

is a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth contributing to the rise in commodity prices a slowdown in the rate of agricultural productivity growth is thought by many observers to be contributing to the recent rise in agricultural prices in this article i decompose sources of output growth in global agriculture into aggregate input and total factor productivity tfp components and examine whether productivity growth slowed substantially in the years leading up to the recent rise in commodity prices contrary to widely held perceptions i find no evidence of a general slowdown in sector wide agricultural tfp at least through 2006 if anything the growth rate in agricultural tfp accelerated in recent decades however the results do show a slowdown in the growth of agricultural investment accelerating tfp growth largely offset decelerating input growth to keep the real output of global agriculture growing at about 2 per year since the 1960s regionally however agricultural productivity performance has been uneven these findings have important implications for the appropriate supply side policy response to the current agricultural price crisis

technological regimes catching up and leapfrogging findings from the korean industries abstract this paper examines the experiences of selected industries in korea to identify the stylized facts in the process of technological capability building and thereby to sort out the conditions for the catching up to occur to explain the process we have built a model of technological and market catching up a special attention has been given to the question of whether there has been a case of leapfrogging in any industry in korea and if so what are the conditions for its incidence in our framework we first measure the degree of catching up in terms of market shares in the world then we focus on catching up in technological capabilities in explaining the different record and prospects of korean industries in market catching up in the model technological capability is determined as a function of both technological effort and the existing knowledge base as determinants of technological effort we look at the technological regimes of the industries such as cumulativeness of technical advances fluidity predictability of technological trajectory and the properties of knowledge base using this model we explain the different technological evolution of the selected industries in korea including the d ram automobile mobile phone consumer electronics personal computer and machine tool industries we find three different patterns of catching ups path creating catching up cdma mobile phone path skipping catching up d ram and automobile and path following catching up consumer electronics personal computers and machine tools we interpret the first two case of catching up as leapfrogging unlike the argument by perez and soete perez c soete l 1988 catching up in technology entry barriers and windows of opportunity in dosi et al eds technical change and economic theory pinter publishers london we find that important r d projects except automobiles where only private r d was involved involved both private and public capacities and that entry was not driven by endogenous generation of knowledge and skills but by collaboration with foreign companies

gradual catch up and enduring leadership in the global wine industry the wine industry is an extremely interesting sector from a catch up point of view because the latecomers in the international market have changed how wine is produced sold and consumed and in doing so they have challenged the positions of incumbents until the end of the 1980s the european countries and particularly france and italy dominated the international market for wine subsequently significant changes in the market namely decreases in consumption by traditional consuming countries the entry of new inexperienced consumers and the increasing importance of large distribution have threatened this supremacy initially the usa and australia and later emerging countries such as chile and south africa gained increasing market shares in both exported volumes and value at the expense of incumbents however some of these newcomers e g australia have shown slower growth opening opportunities for newer entrants such as argentina and new zealand at the same time some of the incumbents especially italy have innovated challenging the leadership of france in key markets such as the usa in this article we investigate the different catch up cycles in the global wine sector that occurred between the 1960s and 2010 through a detailed analysis of export volumes values and unit prices we address issues related to the increasing share in the global market of latecomer countries and the relative decline of the incumbents as well as possible changes in the market leadership within these two groups

opportunities incentives and the collective patterns of technological change in a few pages in the introductory article for this debate vernon ruttan succeeds in the unlikely task of flagging many issues at the core of the economic interpretation of technological change and by doing so he implicitly addresses also a few sensitive spots for the economic discipline at large here i will not attempt to provide any thorough view of what i consider the achievements and limitations of the current state of the art see however freeman i 994 for a critical survey which i largely share rather i shall put forward a series of remarks which hopefully could be seen as part of a much wider and still largely unexplored research programme as a premise just note that some form of attention to technology related phenomena has spread over the last 20 30 years from small enclaves of heterodox economists and economic historians to become an important concern even for quite mainstream theories of e g the firm industrial organisation macroeconomics trade growth etc from patent races all the way to new trade and new growth theories and even real business cycle macro models technical change has drawn a consideration which is less by default than it was say in robert solow s original growth models orjoe bain s barriers to entry views on industrial structures and in parallel empirical studies at the levels of specific technologies firms sectors and countries have boomed for overviews cf dosi i988 nelson i993 freeman i982 i 994 cohen i 995 and granstrand i 994 among others so at least in this sense those decreasing returns to the economics of technical change suggested by ruttan do not seem to have set in however ruttan s paper raises also substantive questions about the relative success of three interpretative perspectives which he calls induced evolutionary and path dependent in the following i shall argue that an evolutionary perspective broadly defined can easily accommodate both inducement effects and path dependent patterns of technical change let me start from what i consider the major building blocks of an

partial pooling at the reserve price in auctions with resale opportunities abstract two features common to many auctions are the use of reserve prices and the existence of secondary markets for the goods being sold even in simple symmetric settings the combination of these features can preclude existence of an equilibrium in symmetric separating bidding strategies with a reserve price sufficiently far below the maximum endogenous valuation a symmetric equilibrium still exists but with some types pooling at the reserve the optimal reserve price depends not only on the joint distribution of bidders information before and after the auction but also on how surplus is divided in the secondary market journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c7 l1 d82

the made in effect and leapfrogging a model of leadership change for products with country of origin bias abstract change in industrial leadership is often explained in terms of technological and costs advantages however firms in emerging economies not only have to produce high quality cost competitive goods but also win the resistance of consumers in the world market who are often adverse to purchasing products from countries that yet have to build a reputation we argue that this country of origin bias significantly influences the chances of leadership change a model that aims at capturing the endogenous dynamics of demand building and leapfrogging is proposed we show that in sectors with high monopoly power acquiring a superior technology is not sufficient for a latecomer country to become leader unless a significant share of consumers is aware of the quality of its products an extension of the model to multiple sectors shows that a latecomer country remains specialized into low value undifferentiated goods even after overtaking the technology of the leading country

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

reforms the weather and productivity growth in china s grain sector we use disaggregate county level production data to study the effects of economic reform on china s grain production between 1980 and 1990 china s grain production area is divided into five regions based on geographic agronomic and meteorological criteria regional grain production functions are estimated and weather is explicitly modeled the institutional impact of economic reform was found to explain about 38 of the production growth from 1980 to 1985 this is lower than the estimates reported in many previous studies regional differences in efficiency gains from economic reform and in the effects of weather on grain production are found to be significant

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

recent evolutionary theorizing about economic change this famous passage from marshall s principles of economics it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907 nicely brings out two issues which are as germane to economics today as they were when marshall wrote the first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of equilibrium the other is the appeal that biological conceptions3x201d have for many economists particularly when their focus is on economic change

sectoral systems of innovation and production the concept sectoral system of innovation and production provides a multidimensional integrated and dynamic view of sectors it is proposed that a sectoral system is a set of products and the set of agents carrying out market and non market interactions for the creation production and sale of those products a sectoral systems has a specific knowledge base technologies inputs and demand agents are individuals and organizations at various levels of aggregation they interact through processes of communication exchange co operation competition and command and these interactions are shaped by institutions a sectoral system undergoes change and transformation through the co evolution of its various elements 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

china s regional agricultural productivity growth in 1985 2007 a multilateral comparison1 in this study we estimate total factor productivity tfp growth as well as multilateral tfp index for 25 contiguous china provinces over the 1985 2007 period agricultural output growth for each province was decomposed into tfp growth and input growth where input growth was further disaggregated into contributions from growth of labor capital land and intermediate goods over the study period tfp growth contributed 2 7 percentage points to output growth annually which was slightly higher than the input growth contribution of 2 4 percentage points per annum on average the annual rate of productivity growth peaked during 1996 2000 at 5 1 it slowed in 2000 2005 to a rate of 3 2 per annum and declined in the most recent years 2005 2007 to 3 7 differences in productivity among regions persisted over the entire period the tendency toward faster tfp growth in relatively well off coastal regions may imply a widening of regional inequality

productivity and international competitiveness of agriculture in the european union and the united states this study looks at international competitiveness of agriculture in the european union and the united states the most intuitive concept is that of price competitiveness we calculate relative prices for 11 member states of the european union and the united states for the period 1973 2002 we assume that markets are perfectly competitive and in long run equilibrium so that the observed price always equals average total cost as measured by the cost dual to the production function this assumption is used in our calculation of relative competitiveness and productivity gaps between the european union and the united states and in our decomposition of relative price movements between changes in relative input prices and changes in relative productivity levels

technological regimes and sectoral patterns of innovative activities this paper focuses on the relationships between observed patterns of innovative activities within a sector and the related context and underlying microeconomic processes that might account for them it claims that there are some invariant features with respect to relative prices and incentives mechanisms of learning and knowledge accumulation that greatly affect the rate and structure of innovative activity these features are different across sectors the paper proposes that the specific pattern of innovative activity of a sector can be explained as the outcome of different technological regimes that are implied by the nature of technology and knowledge the notion of technological regime provides a synthetic representation of some of the most important economic properties of technologies and of the characteristics of the learning processes that are involved in innovative activities copyright 1997 by oxford university press

learning and catching up in different sectoral systems evidence from six industries this article claims that catching up is a learning process that requires a long time and often differs significantly across economic sectors in the factors leading to success or failure we support these claims by examining the major factors affecting catching up by several countries in six industries india and brazil for pharmaceuticals korea china and brazil for autos india ireland israel china brazil and other countries for software korea and india for telecommunication equipment korea taiwan china and malaysia for semiconductors and china brazil costa rica and nigeria for some agricultural crops the article uses the framework of sectoral systems and argues that there are significant differences across these sectors in the variables and mechanisms involved in catching up the article identifies the common factors affecting catching up and the main differences across sectoral systems it then discusses the interplay between national systems and sectoral systems copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press