industrial invention a supply and demand model for the uk 1961 1989 a supply and demand model of industrial invention is presented paying particular attention to the impact of past advances on present advances in knowledge the model is estimated using a recent span of uk data a good fitting specification is found which passes a battery of diagnostic tests and possesses sensible long run properties and an interpretable lag structure the specific results found should be of potential interest to governments wishing to encourage the flow of inventions by fiscal means

water markets market reform and the urban poor results from jakarta indonesia abstract roughly 20 of the eight million persons in jakarta receive water from municipal water connections to their homes remaining supplies are essentially private and include street vendors standpipes and wells the last of these an inexpensive but increasingly contaminated source in many areas an expansion of the network of in house connections is in progress but will take several decades to complete in the interim various strategies have been advanced to deal with persistent problems of access to good water by the poor this study examines the impacts of one such plan put to action the april 1990 deregulation measure permitting private homes with water connections to resell municipal water we present preliminary evidence that the primary social benefits of deregulation are the money savings and increased consumption by former vendor and standpipe customers in most respects the aggregate effect is equivalent to a costless expansion in the standpipe system with the difference on the supply side that significant transfers from vendors and standpipe operators to household resellers may occur

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis reply to fare and grosskopf fare and grosskopf this issue claim that a single abatement factor suffices for modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production models and that the kuosmanen 2005 technology that uses multiple abatement factors is larger than necessary this article demonstrates by a numerical example that a single abatement factor does not suffice to capture all feasible production plans and that its use leads to the violation of convexity one of the maintained assumptions of the model we also prove that the kuosmanen technology is the correct minimum extrapolation technology under the stated axioms

modeling the virtuous circle of innovation a test on italian firms this article investigates the virtuous circle between innovative inputs outputs and economic performance with a three equation model highlighting feedback loops and simultaneous relations an empirical test is conducted of innovative expenditure innovative sales and economic results in a sample of italian manufacturing firms comparing occasional and serial innovators the data for 1998 2007 are drawn from a rich panel of italian firms with 20 or more employees compiled by the italian national institute of statistics including three waves of community innovation surveys the model extends that developed at the industry level by bogliacino and pianta industrial and corporate change 2013a 22 3 649 678 innovation and demand in industry dynamics r d new products and profits in a pyka and e s andersen eds long term economic development economic complexity and evolution springer verlag berlin 2013b and confirms those earlier findings for the core of persistent innovators there are complex links at play in different phases of the innovation process and in the feedback between economic success and sustained innovation expenditure

institutionalizing end user demand steering in agricultural r d farmer levy funding of r d in the netherlands abstract the purpose of this paper is to critically examine the institutionalization of demand driven modes of working in the r d planning process and reveal possible weaknesses through an analysis of a system of collective r d funding by farmers the findings indicate that although end users have the opportunity to raise issues that lead to r d queries are influenced by several actors in the r d planning process in such a way that they do not adequately reflect farmers innovation needs conclusions are that more emphasis is required on joint demand articulation and involvement of end users and other stakeholders in the innovation process and on the institutional development of r d funding organizations in order to adopt a more inclusive view on innovation

technological intensity concept and measurement abstract technological intensity the degree to which scientific research effort contributes to an industry s productivity increase and or revenue enhancement is commonly measured by the industry s ratio of own performed research to its output if this r d output percentage is taken as an indicator of the need for public support it is seriously misleading an industry benefits as well by research undertaken by the foreign affiliates of its member firms by its first and higher round suppliers and by university and government laboratories this view is supported by evidence from canada

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

causal relationships between public sector agricultural research expenditures and output allocative decisions concerning public sector agricultural research appear to be driven by both supply and politically mediated demand forces in sample granger tests along with post sample predictive tests suggest that simultaneity issues should not be ignored when modeling the research expenditure output relationship the results also provide strong evidence that the impact of research expenditures on agricultural output may persist for as long as thirty years these lags are substantially longer than those commonly used for agricultural research to date the lagged effect of output on research appears to be shorter though still between ten and twelve years in this article we analyze the empirical relationship between public sector agricultural research and agricultural output our interest in this question was spurred on two fronts first emphasis of the contemporary economic literature has shifted from an analysis of the consequences of technical change to an explanation of the observed rate and direction of inventive activity a substantial proportion of this literature has focused on appropriable technologies originating in the private sector and remained largely silent on related issues in the public sector here we analyze the dynamics of public sector research in particular publicly sponsored agricultural research in the

the fruits of intellectual production economic and scientific specialisation among oecd countries this paper brings together data from 14 oecd countries on scientific publications patents and production specialisation to explore the relationship between economic and production specialisation for 17 manufacturing sectors since marx there has been a fundamental debate in economics about the link between science and the economic system marx argued that the developments in the science system are strongly influenced by changes in the economic sphere whereas polanyi argued that developments in science are largely independent of economic sphere using a panel data model and econometric estimations at the sectoral level the paper assesses the two positions and finds considerable support for marx s position that is that scientific and production specialisation are often tightly linked

demand and innovation schmookler re examined schmookler s demand pull hypothesis implying that innovation is a function of market demand has been widely accepted re reading schmookler s invention and economic growth we discover a statistical inadequacy re estimating his cross section results in a different way we find somewhat lower coefficients moreover the direction of causality appears to be far from obvious an independent cross sectional test of the schmookler hypothesis in the netherlands based on r d instead of patent data shows similar results the relationship between indicators of demand and innovation turns out to be generally weaker but in most cases still significant and the results suggest that there is a simultaneous relationship between demand and innovation the latter may be explained by the concept of the innovation multiplier which has implications for macro economic modelling 1 re reading schmookler schmookler s 13 finding of a strong relationship between investment in capital goods users industries and patent applications by capital goods producing sectors has been generally accepted by economists as evidence that patenting is a function of effective demand demand pull hypothesis quite a number of case studies have followed schmookier s seminal work but there have been

does commercialization undermine the benefits of decentralization for local services provision evidence from mexico s urban water and sanitation sector summary decentralization has been promoted as a means to better reflect citizen preferences and improve local services many developing countries decentralized and promoted neoliberal policies such as commercialization simultaneously leaving mayors with the responsibility of improving public services through self financing reforms this study evaluates experiences in three mexican cities to assess whether decentralization and commercialization practices have resulted in improved water and sanitation services it finds that commercialization has increased social conflict surrounding urban services provision and that local institutional constraints further undermine mayor s ability to adopt politically contentious policies the result has been stalled and uneven service improvements

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

food beliefs and food supply chains the impact of religion and religiosity in israel abstract this paper demonstrates that religion and religiosity affect norms which affect food consumption patterns and production heterogeneity and asymmetric information lead to multiple certification channels as well as multiple supply chains major supply chains may address multiple constituencies that are secular or less religious technological change affects norms and thus the food system we obtain these results by analyzing the food systems for meat products in israel where there are three religions jews muslims and christians and people assign themselves three levels of religiosity secular conservative and orthodox israel has multiple kosher and halal certifiers and several specialized supermarket chains for orthodox groups its main supermarket chains serve secular and some conservative segments the immigration of secular jews from russia led to the proliferation of non kosher supply chains and products and increased consumption of pork new technologies and higher incomes led to emergence of fast food chains serving orthodox jews that had previously tended to eat at home

local demand pull policy and energy innovation evidence from the solar photovoltaic market in china abstract market demand is an important driver for inducing innovation with many empirical studies supporting the demand induced innovation hypothesis critiques of such studies however emphasize that new empirical evidence that can address existing empirical challenges is needed furthermore existing literature disagrees about whether the locus of demand pull policy matters in this paper we use empirical evidence from the distributed solar photovoltaic pv market in china to address the following questions 1 is there evidence of demand induced innovation 2 does the effect of local demand pull policy differ from the effect of non local demand pull policy on demand induced innovation to address these questions we develop and analyze an original database of pv balance of system bos patents in the distributed pv market filed between 2005 and 2014 in china our results support the demand induced innovation hypothesis and suggest that only local demand significantly induces pv bos innovations in the distributed pv market in china the different effects of local demand and non local demand emphasize the importance of local markets and local policies lending some support to bottom up approaches to clean energy governance

incentives and uncertainty an empirical analysis of the impact of demand on innovation we study the impact of demand on innovation by focusing on a sample of small and medium sized enterprises in several industries and european countries we analyse how demand stimulates innovation by providing economic incentives and reducing uncertainty considering the size of the market as a proxy for the presence of demand we find support for the idea that the presence of incentives stimulates innovation this is particularly true for process innovation in considering interaction with customers as a way to reduce uncertainty we find that firms that see customers as the most important sources of information for both innovation ideas and completion tend to introduce product innovations firm size r d expenditure and sectoral effects also matter

demand structure and technological change the case of the european semiconductor industry abstract this article proposes that the structure of demand is one of the major factors that affect the rate and direction of technological change and the evolution of high technology industries both over time and across countries this article presents an analysis of the semiconductor industry in europe the united states and japan although particular emphasis is placed on the european case the decline of the european industry 1960s from a position equal to that of the american industry 1950s can to a large extent be explained by the dominance of electronics consumer goods demand rather than public procurement or computer demand in the structure of demand in these countries the later technological convergence of electronics final markets 1970s played a major role in the commitment of the european semiconductor industry to lsi technology this commitment however came too late to allow the european industry to catch up with its american and japanese counterparts

public procurement and innovation resurrecting the demand side abstract demand is a major potential source of innovation yet the critical role of demand as a key driver of innovation has still to be recognised in government policy this article discusses public procurement as one of the key elements of a demand oriented innovation policy the paper starts by signaling the new significance of public procurement for innovation policy strategies at the eu level and in a range of european countries it then defines the concept of public procurement and embeds this concept within a taxonomy of innovation policies the rationales and justifications of public procurement policies to spur innovation are discussed followed by a consideration of the challenges and potential pitfalls as well as appropriate institutional arrangements and strategies including some recent empirical examples of good practice it concludes by confronting the public procurement approach with two of the most common objections to it and by considering future prospects

farmers financing of agricultural research in israel abstract agricultural research is mostly a public undertaking in israel as in many other countries farmers participate in the finance of research through taxes imposed by farm organizations on the marketed products farmers contribution ranges from 8 of research outlay in tomatoes to 79 in cotton strength of organization and ease of collection were the major factors affecting this share in general as inflation eroded the real value of government s finance the farmers increased their share representatives of farmers organization participate in the bodies that approve grants to proposed research projects it was found that the higher the share of farmers finance the larger the part of short term research directed at immediate outcomes and the smaller the part of long term more basic research the tendency of the farmers to prefer short term applicable research may reflect both their familiarity with practical problems and a comparatively high degree of risk aversion it is not clear how farmers participation in the direction of research which is based on their financial contribution affects the efficiency of resource allocation to the agricultural sciences

the five percent rule for improved water service can households afford more abstract results of household willingness to pay surveys in five small moroccan cities reveal that respondents would pay 7 to 10 of total household expenditures for individual water connections and subsequent commodity charges despite already having reliable and free standpost service the study also illustrates that relatively low cost rapid and reliable survey techniques to learn about water demand characteristics are possible and therefore should routinely be incorporated into the planning for all developing country water projects

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

bureaucratic productivity the case of agricultural research revisited two questions related to the financing of agricultural research merit further study first to the extent that selective access to agricultural research is possible there is no presumption that research results should be distributed in a way which gives everyone equal access moreover the returns for a large part of agricultural research can be appropriated by the developer through patents copyrights and other means thus there is no presumption that publicly financed research services should be equally available to everyone since in general equal access to government services is neither necessary nor efficient goldin 1977 54 more attention should be devoted to the method of financing agricultural research i e by taxation versus market prices

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

nerlovian revenue inefficiency in a bank production context evidence from shinkin banks the paper further advances the contemporary methodological and empirical research on bank efficiency we introduce a bank two stage network revenue decomposition analysis based on the slack based directional inefficiency measurement framework by building upon the approaches of epure and lafuente 2015 fukuyama and weber 2009 2010 fukuyama and matousek 2017 and fare fukuyama grosskopf and zelenyuk 2015 2016 we apply the model on the segment of japanese financial institutions shinkin banks we examine the efficiency performance of shinkin banks during the period from march 2007 to march 2015 this covers the recent years after the turmoil in the us subprime residential mortgage market which started early 2007 the applied innovative framework is particularly suitable for this type of banks since the financing of their business activities is mainly dependent on the different types of deposits that the proposed model takes into consideration

sources of innovation in agricultural technology abstract this paper focuses attention on environmental and biological characteristics of agriculture which shape the process of technical innovation the interaction of natural selection and human purposive selection and experimentation is shown to result in a continuous process of innovation placing farmers in the informal r and d systems as well as scientists in formal r and d systems in an innovative treadmill the importance and limitations of informal r and d are reviewed a discussion of the characteristics and potential of formal r and d systems leads to the identification of some major problems of policy inherent in and specific to the organization and management of agricultural research resources these include genetic vulnerability choices between environmentally specific or widely adapted technologies the location of research activity the linkages between agricultural producers and scientists and methods for maintaining and strengthening informal r and d systems

the development of an infrastructure for entrepreneurship abstract this paper takes a macroperspective of entrepreneurship and focuses on the issues and events involved in constructing an industrial infrastructure that facilitates and constrains entrepreneurship this infrastructure includes 1 institutional arrangements to legitimate regulate and standardize a new technology 2 public resource endowments of basic scientific knowledge financing mechanisms and a pool of competent labor as well as 3 proprietary rd numerous entrepreneurial actors in the public and not for profit sectors play crucial roles it motivates one to examine the different roles played by these actors and how their joint contributions interact to develop and commercialize a new technology this in turn makes it possible to understand how the risk time and cost to an individual entrepreneur are significantly influenced by developments in the overall infrastructure for entrepreneurship it also explains why the entrepreneurs who run in packs will be more successful than those that go it alone to develop their innovations

resolving the deposit dilemma a new dea bank efficiency model abstract one of the weaknesses of current bank efficiency models is a disagreement as to the role of deposits in the bank production process some models view deposits as an input while others view them as an output such disparity of approaches results in inconsistent efficiency estimates in this study we propose an alternative data envelopment analysis dea bank efficiency model that treats deposits as an intermediate product thus emphasizing the dual role of deposits in the bank production process consequently the effect of the amount of deposits on bank efficiency depends on the efficiency at both stages of the bank production process the main advantage of our model is that it does not require a researcher to make a judgment call as to whether having more production approach or less intermediation approach deposits is better for bank efficiency our unified framework has the potential to produce more consistent efficiency estimates

supply and demand factors of cleaner technologies some empirical evidence this article identifies and analyzes factors that affect the willingness of firms and consumers to develop and adopt cleaner technologies cleaner technologies is used as a general term for pollution abatement technologies re use systems and environmentally sound consumer products and materials the article also contains the findings of three case studies on cleaner technologies cfc substitutes low solvent paints and coatings and membrane technology in which the importance of the identified factors is investigated from the case studies some general conclusions are drawn about these factors and the way in which policy instruments can be used to stimulate innovation in and diffusion of cleaner technologies no single policy instrument is considered to be optimal instead a policy mix is needed involving a much wider use of economic instruments

patenting and inventive activity on synthetic fibre intermediates abstract the demand pull theory of invention and innovation has drawn much of its support from the work of jacob schmookler on patent time series in this work schmookler found no evidence that scientific discoveries or major inventions had provided the stimulus for important inventions however it is argued here that his method was not well designed to detect such effects any effect of a particular scientific or technological development is likely to occur in a rather narrow area of technology so that detection of science push and technology push will be favoured by the examination of narrow areas of inventive activity manufacturing processes for groups of chemical products subject to similar demand side factors provide convenient such areas in this study time series of patents on processes for eight intermediates for synthetic fibres have been examined they are not consistent with a simple demand pull theory but rather with the view that inventive activity is affected both by demand and by technological opportunity two of the intermediates have been examined in detail and evidence has been presented that in one case a major invention arose from science push and in the other one arose from technology push

technical and scale efficiency of japanese commerical banks a non parametric approach not only are the nature and extent and scale efficiency of japanese commerical banks studied but a relationship between both organizational status and size efficiency is also announced the efficiency measures are computed from a 1990 sample of cross sectional data for the estimation we employ the non parametric approach which has recently been gaining popularity for the studies of banking efficiency outside japan

resource allocation for agricultural research abstract the allocation of resources for agricultural research is investigated in this paper a theoretical model for optimal allocation of research resources is developed and conditions are derived for an optimal solution the model is applied to existing data for 12 crops and lines of production in israel during the period 1978 1987 the actual allocation and the discrepancy between the actual allocation and the optimal allocation of resources to the crops considered is explained in a regression model by two groups of variables policy variables and political pressure variables the results support the findings of previous studies that political pressure plays a major role in the process of resource allocation for argicultural research

the influence of market demand upon innovation a critical review of some recent empirical studies abstract a number of recent empirical studies of technical change at the level of the individual firm have concluded that market demand is the dominant influence upon the innovation process calling forth innovations in market economies the pace of innovation in the private sector heavily influences the growth of national output and productivity and these studies and their conclusions have therefore received much attention having been extensively quoted in discussions of appropriate government policy for the encouragement of innovation this paper reviews a number of these studies and concludes that their findings and the interpretations of their findings in the secondary literature are seriously flawed and in many cases invalid the proposition that market demand governs the innovation process is by no means conclusively demonstrated in these studies and they are therefore inadequate and inappropriate guides for the formulation of policy most of the studies examined employ a working definition of demand factors which is so broad as to embrace a range of possible influences upon innovation which should more properly be classified elsewhere the concept of demand utilized in these studies bears little resemblance to the more restrictive and precise definition of market demand found in economics in addition the phenomena analyzed in these studies are a very heterogeneous lot the studies do not address identical empirical questions and their findings are as a result neither uniform nor unambiguous both demand and supply side influences are crucial to understanding the innovation process and it is the exclusive preoccupation with only one set of these forces which is criticized in this paper some implications of the criticism for government policy toward innovation are discussed in the conclusion

inadequacy of technology and innovation systems at the periphery inadequacy of technology is a child of structuralism the concept of a national system of innovation nsi is a child of evolutionary theory a dialogue between these concepts can enrich our understanding of the problems involved in building nsis at the periphery celso furtado explains the structural roots of modernisation marginalisation polarisation and how the orientation of technology of underdeveloped countries is embedded in income concentration the formation of welfare states at the periphery provides nsis with a new focusing device helping to break the marginalisation side of the process the combined formation of nsis and welfare systems is an institutional response to modernisation marginalisation polarisation

the management and evaluation of technological programs and the dynamics of techno economic networks the case of the afme abstract the process of innovation and diffusion requires more and more interactions between the world of science and technology and the marketplace in order to describe these dynamics we define a techno economic network ten as a coordinated set of heterogeneous actors public laboratories technical research centers industrial firms users who participate collectively in the development and diffusion of innovations and via numerous interactions organize the relationships between scientifico technical research and the market although the word network is not systematically used there have been during the last years many more government interventions that we call technological programs aimed at supporting the emergence constitution and growth of tens which can attain the objectives corresponding to the program s pre defined goals based on an empirical study of the french agency for energy management afme this article presents a series of concepts and tools which are designed to describe the morphology of tens are they incomplete or chained convergent or dispersed long or short and to analyse their dynamics notions like anticipated networks breakthrough actions versus continuing operations intermediate results are presented examples of their use for the management and the evaluation of the technological programs are given

indian bank efficiency and productivity changes with undesirable outputs a disaggregated approach the objective of this study is to examine technical efficiency and productivity growth in the indian banking sector over the period from 2004 to 2011 we apply an innovative methodological approach introduced by chen et al 2011 and barros et al 2012 who use a weighted russell directional distance model to measure technical inefficiency we further modify and extend that model to measure tfp change with npls we find that the inefficiency levels are significantly different among the three ownership structure of banks in india foreign banks have strong market position in india and they pull the production frontier in a more efficient direction spbs and domestic private banks show considerably higher inefficiency we conclude that the restructuring policy applied in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the indian government has not had a long lasting effect

on the sources of technological change assessing the evidence this paper uses a selective review of the economic literature on technological change to support four points that are important for interpreting and incorporating technological change into formal models of energy and the environment the review 1 supports the notion that no single source dominates the process of technological change it supports roles for rd 3 indicates that these spillovers are often indirect requiring own industry activities to utilize and 4 indicates that simple experience curve calibrations often used in formal models likely include a range of sources of technological change in addition to learning by doing some of which might not be induced by the sorts of policies typically considered in the climate context

technological capabilities invisible infrastructure and the un social construction of predictability the overlooked fixed costs of useful research the paper explores the idea that unpredictability is a much more pervasive and important feature of technical change than is traditionally supposed it explains how economically important interactions between scientific explanations and technology require the construction of very specific artificially predictable conditions where explanations implications match technologies behaviour the iterative construction of these localised predictable conditions from unpredictable starting materials relies on generates and is made easier by reusable social and physical infrastructure the paper develops a non tautological model of technological capabilities and provides a novel explanation for a range of empirical findings theoretical and policy implications are reported

macroeconomic conditions and the determinants of commercialisation in this paper we focus on the effects of macroeconomic conditions on commercialisation using survey data on the activities of australian inventors who attempted to commercialise 3 736 inventions over the period 1986 2005 we find evidence that macroeconomic conditions have a pro cyclical effect on commercialisation activities such a finding has important policy implications since it suggests that recessions have both short term effects on employment income and long term effects on productivity however the magnitude of the supply side effects the cost of finance and level of public sector research are estimated to be larger than the growth in aggregate or industry demand copyright the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

a review of innovation research in tourism abstract over the past two decades there has been increasing focus on the topic of innovation in tourism this article reviews the research contributions various categories of innovation product process managerial marketing and institutional are addressed important determinants of innovation are acknowledged including the role of entrepreneurship technology push and the existence of territorial industry clusters representation of knowledge is also identified as a critical factor for both the occurrence and nature of innovations the review reveals that there is still only limited systematic and comparable empirical evidence of the level of innovative activities and their impacts and wider implications for destinations and national economies an agenda for future research is emerging suggesting that there is quest for both formal quantification and for qualitative studies of the foundations processes implications and policies of innovation in tourism

the dynamics of technological innovation the case of the pharmaceutical industry abstract this paper examines the mechanisms and dynamics of the process of innovation in companies and sectors of the chemical industry it is based on analysis of science and technology output indicators namely patents and innovations evaluated in terms of originality and in the case of innovations in terms of market success as well radical innovation ri is identified as the kingpin for the evolution of technologies in both the micro and macro economic context not only because it provides a model for imitation but also because it turns out to be more profitable for the innovating companies than incremental innovation at the micro economic level this paper examines the significance of diverse driving forces which lead a company to the launching of projects aiming at ri measures the length of commitment to such projects and describes the dynamic effects generated by the introduction of a successful ri and how they affect the company s subsequent r d and market orientation at the macro economic level this paper identifies the stages of youth growth maturity and decline of the subsectors of the chemical industry examines the distribution of ri and market successful innovations over the development of a sector describes the influence of market demand and capital investment on technological advance and compares the development of national chemical industries the paper concludes with an account of the dynamics of technological innovation in the chemical industry over the period 1930 1985 which is based on the empirical findings of the previous sections

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

deriving the dea frontier for two stage processes data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently dea has been extended to examine the efficiency of two stage processes where all the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs to the second stage the resulting two stage dea model provides not only an overall efficiency score for the entire process but as well yields an efficiency score for each of the individual stages due to the existence of intermediate measures the usual procedure of adjusting the inputs or outputs by the efficiency scores as in the standard dea approach does not necessarily yield a frontier projection the current paper develops an approach for determining the frontier points for inefficient dmus within the framework of two stage dea

systems of innovation theory and the changing architecture of agricultural research in africa abstract this paper examines the on going evolution of the organisational architecture of agricultural research in africa once considered a rural backwater populated by agronomists extension agents and farmers agricultural research is now being explicitly placed within global debates about innovation technology institutions and development this is reflected in a growing interest in the use of systems of innovation theory to both understand and reform innovation processes within agriculture the basic argument put forward in the paper is that the conception of a global agricultural research system and associated efforts to create a coordinated multi layered supra national research infrastructure are at odds with both the realities of research at national level and the bio physical and socio economic heterogeneity that characterises rural africa it is suggested that a less directive approach to support for agricultural research is required to allow national characteristics and differences to come to the fore and to give more room for the development of the all important demand side

the farm tractor and the nature of technological innovation abstract while the of diffusion of technology has been extensively studied a sysetematic treatment of origin of innovations is generally lacking this has important implications for studies not only of the phenomenon of diffusion itself but also for studies of long term growth of productivity this paper presents an investigation of technological innovations in the farm tractor during a time period of nearly five decades from its genesis it is concluded that the observed advances in technology are attributable to variations in farm size and experience acquired in the production and utilization of the tractor over the course of time more generally two main hypotheses of technological change emerge from the results of thus study one is the hypothesis of learning i e that technological innovation originates in the accumulated experience of a practical nature the other is the hypothesis of scaling i e that the process of innovation is further governed by changes in the size of the larger system within which the technology is embedded however certain widely believed alternative hypotheses of technological change do not seem to generally hold it is concluded that technological development is an evolutionary process which is best understood in terms of an internal logic of its own

does basic services privatisation benefit the urban poor some evidence from water supply privatisation in thailand access to safe water and sanitation has been a development priority for decades this is also included in the millennium development goal targets meanwhile privatisation of water supply continues to be a subject of intense debate particularly as to its effects on the urban poor the arguments for and against often reflect the intellectual divide between socialist ideals and neo liberal pragmatism key issues are access quality and price this paper reports findings from an investigation of thailand s first water supply privatisation scheme implemented in 1998 household level data for the poor defined by community and income status show a significant improvement in access to piped water despite an increase in the connection cost and monthly charges the associated benefits from access include improved water quality and service a promising plus is the prospect of improvement in tenure status for the households living in informal settlements

elements of a schumpeterian catalytic research and innovation policy in this article we take a fresh look at research and innovation r i hereinafter policy and define a new notion schumpeterian catalytic r i policy such policy style amends and enriches the new mission oriented framework for innovation policy by assigning more weight to the microeconomic dimension of private actors actions and by being more concerned with the temporary nature of interventions we relate our argument to recent empirical trends in productivity dynamics and innovative activities these suggest that an innovation slowdown is taking place and consequently that a renewed interest in the re direction rather than on the intensity of innovative activities is key to the design of r i policy capable to tackle current challenges we use the evidence to build a schematic theoretical framework to inform policy design and we outlined the defining features of our proposed policy style

shadow prices and pollution costs in u s agriculture abstract we use the directional output distance function to derive estimates of production inefficiency shadow prices for polluting outputs and the associated pollution costs using a quadratic functional form for the directional output distance function and data for the u s agricultural sector during 1960 1996 we find that the pollution costs the shadow values from the runoff and leaching of pesticides are 6 of crop and animal revenues and are highest in the midwest and lowest in the western states if states were to reduce technical inefficiency and operate on the production frontier pollution costs could be reduced by 7

estimating output gains by means of luenberger efficiency measures abstract in this paper we propose a new measure of input allocative efficiency that we estimate using directional distance functions our new measure compares the gain in output if a firm reduces technical inefficiency for the direct production possibility set and the gain in output if the firm reduces technical inefficiency for the indirect production possibility set because the directional distance function uses a translated origin the gain in output from an optimal reallocation of inputs can be estimated for non radial expansions in output we estimate efficiency for japanese banks during 1992 1999 the gains in outputs from reducing allocative inefficiency by reallocating inputs are greater than the gains in outputs that can be attained by reducing technical inefficiency

lessons from an economy with limited market functions r d in hungary in the 1980s abstract in the former socialist countries science developed as a leading force hungary became a special case since its science policy in the last two decades served the idea of new economic mechanism introduced in 1968 market oriented socialism still remained a shortage economy with lack of competition and of market demand for technical development the r d institutions had adjusted to the economic environment and had developed a great deal of business oriented activities to survive the falling budget support the relationship between academia and industry was unbalanced as a special kind of science push model due to the economic environment of shortage the original model was upside down instead of leading economic growth r d institutions had to adjust to the lower technical level of the industry facing political and economic transitions the scientific and business interests and values have been mixed or are overlapping and are both in danger if the market economy does not soon develop

the social shaping of the national science base abstract innovation studies confirm de tocqueville s prediction that continuous technical change in business firms in modern society would require the development in close proximity of publicly funded basic research and associated training the rate and direction of the development of a country s science base is strongly influenced by its level of economic development and the composition of its economic and social activities in other words it is socially shaped

the role of home country demand in the internationalization of new ventures international new ventures invs have been documented to exist all around the world but the literature is silent on the frequency of such companies in different countries we contend that the propensity of new ventures to internationalize by forming international partnerships is higher in small domestic demand countries because they have a greater motivation given their limited local demand after discussing the methodological challenges in testing this hypothesis we do such a test by studying alliances in the health segment of the biotech industry in relatively small domestic demand countries australia israel and taiwan and by comparing the results with five large domestic demand countries uk germany france us and japan we find that young firms in the countries with smaller domestic demand are at least 3 times more likely to enter into international partnerships than their counterparts in countries with larger domestic demand we further demonstrate that this difference can primarily be explained by the difference in the size of domestic healthcare markets rather than other underlying opportunity structure related factors

enabling frameworks for low carbon technology transfer to small emerging economies analysis of ten case studies in chile abstract technology transfer is crucial to reduce the carbon intensity of developing countries enabling frameworks need to be in place to allow foreign technologies to flow to be absorbed and to bring about technological change in the recipient country this paper contributes to identifying these enabling factors by analysing 10 case studies of low carbon technology transfer processes based in chile our findings show the importance of strong economic and institutional fundamentals a sound knowledge base a sizable and stable demand and a functioning local industry policy recommendations are derived to improve the penetration of foreign low carbon technologies in developing countries focusing on the particularities of small and medium emerging economies

technological paradigms past present and future the special issue is introduced and contextualised technological paradigms emerged as science push models of innovation were being displaced by demand pull models that justified a more international market focussed political economy technological paradigms help explain the strengths and weaknesses of both models and why the governance choice is not between either markets or governments but an appropriate mixture of both while technological paradigms have successfully shifted policy and management attention to building stocks of knowledge they still have substantial underexploited analytical potential

foresight for public procurement and regional innovation policy the case of lombardy public procurement can be a major source of innovation the potential benefits of public procurement might be fully exploited through the acquisition not only of appliances which are already available in the market but also of new appliances which are tailored to the specific needs of the local community and might be exported as well to the international markets in this way public procurement might allow to improve the services delivered to the local community and to increase the technological competitiveness of the local industrial and research system in this context regional foresight might help identify both long term societal needs and the patterns of evolution of emerging technologies that can match these needs the purpose of this paper is to illustrate trough the recent experience of the regional government of lombardy the role of foresight for enhancing public procurement and innovation policy at the regional level

the economic dynamics of technologies development abstract there is little doubt about the fact that specific major technologies shape the long waves in economic activity the trouble is that we don t understand very well what exactly is meant economically by the term specific technologies synthetic materials microelectronics and alike the purpose of this paper is to set up a conceptual framework to fit this requirement and thus to understand the economic dynamics of the development process involved schumpeter did study the innovation s economics dynamics still he did not elaborate a consistent story and the internal forces of a given technology as for ourselves following schmookler by theorizing the behaviour of the small innovation instead of the major one and rosenberg by taking into consideration the technical heuristic as such we suggest a framework for the dynamics of technologies development we use an evolutionary approach a la nelson and winter and gradually define the different components of this special dynamics a specific technology would appear to be a theoretical unit which gives structure to elementary small innovations according to a particular cumulative path

water for all how to combine public management with commercial practice for the benefit of the poor water is critical to improving the health and welfare of the expanding urban populations of the south unfortunately few cities in poor countries have managed to develop institutions able to supply the poor with water let alone take away the waste one city that has managed to do so is bogota colombia the results of this public company are impressive and have been achieved by adopting some elements of neo liberal economic thought and by maintaining independence from political pressure recently however the water company s operations and particularly its efficiency and pricing policy have come under attack from a new left of centre mayor the paper explores the legitimacy of some of the attacks and examines whether they constitute fair political debate or a means of undermining what by the standards of the south is an effective company

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis with undesirable outputs environmental economics and natural resources group at wageningen university in the netherlands weak disposability of outputs means that firms can abate harmful emissions by decreasing the activity level modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis has caused some confusion this article identifies a dilemma in these approaches conventional formulations implicitly and unintentionally assume all firms apply uniform abatement factors however it is usually cost effective to abate emissions in those firms where the marginal abatement costs are lowest this article presents a simple formulation of weak disposability that allows for non uniform abatement factors and preserves the linear structure of the model

the dynamics of innovation from national systems and mode 2 to a triple helix of university industry government relations abstract the triple helix of university industry government relations is compared with alternative models for explaining the current research system in its social contexts communications and negotiations between institutional partners generate an overlay that increasingly reorganizes the underlying arrangements the institutional layer can be considered as the retention mechanism of a developing system for example the national organization of the system of innovation has historically been important in determining competition reorganizations across industrial sectors and nation states however are induced by new technologies biotechnology ict the consequent transformations can be analyzed in terms of neo evolutionary mechanisms university research may function increasingly as a locus in the laboratory of such knowledge intensive network transitions

the two faces of market support how deployment policies affect technological exploration and exploitation in the solar photovoltaic industry the recent years have seen a strong rise in policies aiming to increase the diffusion of clean energy technologies while there is general agreement that such deployment policies have been very effective in bringing technologies to the market it is less understood how these policies affect technological innovation to shed more light on this important question we conducted comparative case studies with a global sample of 9 firms producing solar photovoltaic pv modules complemented by in depth interviews with 16 leading pv industry experts we propose that on the one hand policy induced market growth serves as an important catalyst for innovative activity as it raises the absolute level of firm investments in technological exploration on the other hand however deployment policies create an incentive for firms pursuing more mature technologies to shift their balance between exploitation and exploration toward exploitation firms focusing on less mature technologies cannot tap the potentials of exploitative learning to the same extent as those with more mature technologies therefore stimulating strong market growth may raise the barrier to market entry for less mature technologies we conclude that when designing deployment policies great care should be taken to avoid adverse effects on technological diversity and a premature lock in into more established technologies

the roles of science in technological innovation abstract one of the central issues in science policy during the past decade has been the extent to which the national levels of expenditure on scientific education and research influence the standard of living this paper provides empirical evidence to show that the pay off from this investment in science is more complex and indirect than previously supposed

decomposing profit inefficiency in dea through the weighted additive model abstract an issue that has received little attention in the data envelopment analysis literature is the decomposition of profit inefficiency by means of measures that account all sources of technical inefficiency in this paper we introduce a new way to measure and decompose profit inefficiency through weighted additive models all our results are derived from a new fenchel mahler inequality using duality theory

demand side vs supply side technology policies hidden treatment and new empirical evidence on the policy mix this paper provides new empirical evidence about the impact of various technological policies upon firms innovative behaviour we take into consideration the role of policies for innovative activities and we focus on their interaction while supply side policies such as r d subsidies and tax credits have been both extensively discussed in the literature and empirically investigated the analysis of innovative public procurement is a growing trend in the literature which still lacks robust empirical evidence in this paper we replicate the existing results on supply side policies surmise fresh empirical evidence on the outcome of innovative public procurement and address the issue of possible interaction among the various tools when controlling for the interaction with other policies supply side subsidies cease to be as effective as reported in previous studies and innovative public procurement seems to be more effective than other tools the preliminary evidence suggests that technology policies exert the highest impact when different policies interact

the role of knowledge in r d efficiency past research has recognized that both demand and capability influence the allocation of r d resources scholars have had an easier time getting a grip on demand than on capability while it has been recognized that knowledge is an important part of capability to date formalization of knowledge and its role in r d activity has been unsatisfactory this paper models the role of knowledge in r d various sources of such knowledge are considered the model throws a different light on analyses that employ a knowledge capital stock and also illuminates the dual private and public nature of technological knowledge

inventor networks in renewable energies the influence of the policy mix in germany technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support various policy instruments that can broadly be categorized as technology push demand pull or systemic constitute part of the policy mix for renewable energies our goal is to gain insights into the influence of this policy mix on the intensity and organization of inventive activities for wind power and photovoltaics in germany since the 1980s we examine the effect of different instruments on the size and structure of co inventor networks based on patent data our results indicate notable differences between the technologies the network size for wind power is driven by technology push and systemic instruments while in photovoltaics demand pull is decisive for network growth by and large the instruments complement each other and form a consistent mix of policy instruments the structure of the networks is driven by demand pull for both technologies systemic instruments increase interaction especially in the wind power network and are complementary to demand pull in fostering collaboration

from government to market and from producer to consumer transition of policy mix towards clean mobility in china abstract this paper proposes a new typology that classifies innovation policy instruments into two dimensions government selection versus market selection and producer orientation versus consumer orientation such a typology articulates the importance of consumer behavior in the policy design for a transition and the relevance for the market to select target subjects of policy during the deployment stage of clean technology innovation we apply this typology to policy instruments of china s new energy vehicle nev industry between 1991 and 2015 in order to explain the industry s rapid growth the focus of china s policy mix has transited from government selection to market selection and from producer orientation to consumer orientation other than the new typology this paper traces the entire history of policy transition within china s nev industry and finds the transition to be a result of policy learning thus contributing to future empirical studies of this industry