A New Taxonomy of Economic sectors With a View to Policy Implications

This paper is an attempt to tease out a taxonomy of economic sectors based on a systems approach to innovation and economic growth that may be useful for policy analysis. The taxonomy explored here revolves around novel products rather than ethereal knowledge-producing entities. This insight goes back to Allyn Young (1928) and Joseph Schumpeter (1934) who argued that the introduction of new goods was the engine of economic growth. More precisely, our taxonomy of sectors focuses on novel products which are efficiency-enhancing within and between sectors through the market mechanism. The scheme revolves around the relationship between 'Enabling' and 'Recipient' sectors (which gives the taxonomy its name: ER), and offers a lens for viewing and interpreting a substantive part of the mechanics of modern economic growth. The last part of the paper briefly discusses a few immediate policy implications, although it has the potential for greater use and value in this regard.innovation, economic growth, enabling linkages approach, knowledge-based economies, novel products, efficiency-enhancing innovations

Microeconomic Policies in the New Economy

Competition policy, Technology policy, Network industries

Organizational support for intrapreneurship and its interaction with human capital to enhance innovative performance

This study explores the impacts of the internal supportive environment for intrapreneurial activities on firms’ innovative performance and the moderating role of human capital in this relationship by making use of a questionnaire study covering 184 manufacturing firms in Turkey. As for the individual direct effects of the dimensions of Organizational Support (OS), Management Support for Idea Generation and Tolerance for Risk Taking are found to exert positive effects on innovative performance. Availability of a Performance Based Reward System and Free Time have no impact on innovativeness, while Work Discretion has a negative one. As for the role of Human Capital (HC), it is found to be an important driver of innovative performance especially when the OS is limited. However, when the levels of both HC and OS are high, innovative performance does not further increase, probably reaching a temporary performance ceiling. Managerial and further research implications are provided

Subsidizing Start-Ups: Policy Targeting and Policy Effectiveness

Start-up subsidies are a frequently employed policy instrument, the use of which is justified by alleged market failure resulting from positive external effects and capital market imperfections. This article investigates whether the allocation of subsidies reflects a policy focus on addressing these market failure occurrences. However, using survey data from the East German state of Thuringia, logistic regressions reveal a rather random subsidization of start-ups. Furthermore, propensity score matching suggests that subsidized start-ups would have survived and thrived in any case, an indication of deadweight losses of start-up subsidies. The analysis points to serious information problems arising when subsidies should be allocated to remedy market failure. Making the situation even more problematic is that failure to precisely target start-up subsidies is likely to result in market distortions and ineffectiveness.Start-ups, Subsidies, Subsidy allocation, Policy evaluation

The International Mobility of Talent and its Impact on Global Development

Human talent is a key economic resource and a source of creative power in science, technology, business, arts and culture and other activities. Talent has a large economic value and its mobility has increased with globalization, the spread of new information technologies and lower transportation costs. Well educated and/or talented people are often more internationally mobile than unskilled workers. Immigrants with high human capital face more favourable immigrantion policies in receiving countries, typically high per capita income economies short of information technology experts, scientists, medical doctors and other types of talent. The purpose of this paper is to review analytical and policy issues related to the international mobility of talented individuals, examining the main types of talent who move internationally, their specific traits and characteristics and the implications of this mobility for source and destination countries and for global development.international migration, international mobility, human resources, human talent

The effects of intellectual property protection on international knowledge contracting

Developing countries, and particularly, those with a growing technological capacity, expect foreign technology transfers to increase when strengthening their intellectual property protection (IPR) rights. This paper evaluates empirically the impact of IPR on disembodied knowledge trade. It presents an exploration on Bilateral French Technology Receipts at the industry level for the period 1994-2000. Two main findings stem from our analysis. First, It is found that IPR affects positively international knowledge contracting. Nevertheless, our findings show that the impact of IPR protection differs according to countries' income level and technological capacity. Stronger IPR rights can deter technology contracting in developing economies. Second, the effects of IPR protection are found to differ across industries. Stronger protection is found to be irrelevant to attract knowledge contracting in R&D-intensive industries, contrarily to middle R&D-intensive industries. Lastly, our findings on industries' sensitivity to foreign IPR protection differ from the results reported by survey studies (Mansfield et alii, 1968; Levin et alii, 1987; Cohen et alii, 2000) concerning the relative importance of IPR protection across industries to appropriate innovation

Selective Industrial and Trade Policies in Developing Countries: Theoretical and Empirical Issues

This paper analyses the case for selective industrial and trade policies in Africa, drawing upon the lessons of East Asia. It reviews the theoretical arguments for government intervention in the context of technological learning, and relates this to the new environment of rapid technical change and globalisation of production. It also considers the risks of government failure in mounting selective policies, and concludes that the degree of selectivity has to be much less than in East Asia. The case for selective policies nevertheless remains strong, if Africa is to make any industrial progress.

Making sense of the New Economy

Dit rapport presenteert een overzicht van de mogelijke definiërende, stuwende factoren achter de zogenaamde 'nieuwe economie'. Op basis van bedrijfskundige en economische literatuur worden vijf causale redenaties ('logica's') herleid. De causale redenaties beschrijven een aantal verbanden tussen informatie- en communicatietechnologieën en economische groei. Daarnaast wordt ingegaan op de effecten van ICT en een aantal prioriteiten voor toegepast onderzoek over ondernemerschap en ondernemingsgedrag.

Competitiveness and Growth of the Mexican Economy.

We address the role that deep, structural factors may have as determinants of Mexico’s economic growth. We argue that Mexico’s poor growth performance appears to be associated not only with shorter-run events such as the "lost decade" of the eighties, but also with supply-side features of the economy that have been present for at least four decades. Mexico’s low competitiveness and poor growth potential seem to reflect an institutional framework that tends to support rigid, non-competitive market structures, and incentives that promote the allocation of resources towards unproductive rent-seeking activities relatively more than into investment, production, productivity, and adoption of superior technologies. We present examples of input markets where we believe these issues are central. We conclude that solving this situation requires microeconomic policies that lead to fundamental changes in the incentive structure of the economy.Competitiveness and growth, productivity, efficiency, comparative advantage.