Innovation, Competition and Growth: A Schumpeterian Perspective on Canada’s Economy

To sustain growth, Canada must engage in a never-ending process of economic development and transformation. To do so, new growth theory indicates that Canada should ensure that competition policy boosts innovation, beware of further extending patent protection, and welcome international trade and technological change.economic growth, innovation policy

R&D, Implementation and Stagnation: A Schumpeterian Theory of Convergence Clubs

We construct a Schumpeterian growth theory consistent with the divergence in per-capita income that has occurred between countries since the mid 19th Century, and with the convergence that occurred between the richest countries during the second half of the 20th Century. The theory assumes that technological change underwent a transformation late in the 19th Century, associated with modern R&D labs. Countries sort themselves into three groups. Those in the highest group converge to a steady state where they do leading edge R&D, while those in the intermediate group converge to a steady state where they implement technologies developed elsewhere. Countries in both of these groups grow at the same rate in the long run, as a result of technology transfer, but inequality between them increases during the transition. Countries in the lowest group grow at a slower rate, with relative incomes that fall asymptotically to zero. Once modern R&D has been introduced, a country may have only a finite window of opportunity in which to introduce the institutions that support it.

A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction

This paper develops a model based on Schumpeter's process of creative destruction. It departs from existing models of endogenous growth in emphasizing obsolescence of old technologies induced by the accumulation of knowledge and the resulting process or industrial innovations. This has both positive and normative implications for growth. In positive terms, the prospect of a high level of research in the future can deter research today by threatening the fruits of that research with rapid obsolescence. In normative terms, obsolescence creates a negative externality from innovations, and hence a tendency for laissez-faire economies to generate too many innovations, i.e too much growth. This "business-stealing" effect is partly compensated by the fact that innovations tend to be too small under laissez-faire. The model possesses a unique balanced growth equilibrium in which the log of GNP follows a random walk with drift. The size of the drift is the average growth rate of the economy and it is endogenous to the model ; in particular it depends on the size and likelihood of innovations resulting from research and also on the degree of market power available to an innovator.

The Effects of Financial Development on Convergence: Theory and Evidence

We introduce imperfect creditor protection in a multi-country version of Schumpeterian growth theory with technology transfer. The theory predicts that the growth rate of any country with more than some critical level of financial development will converge to the growth rate of the world technology frontier, and that all other countries will have a strictly lower long-run growth rate. The theory also predicts that in a country that converges to the frontier growth rate, financial development has a positive but eventually vanishing effect on steady-state per-capita GDP relative to the frontier. We present cross-country evidence supporting these two implications. In particular, we find a significant and sizeable effect of an interaction term between the log of initial per-capita GDP (relative to the United States) and a financial intermediation measure, in an otherwise standard growth regression, implying that the likelihood of converging to the U.S. growth rate increases with financial development. We also find that, as predicted by the theory, the direct effect of financial intermediation in this regression is not significantly different from zero. In addition, we find that other variables representing schooling, geography, health, policy, politics and institutions do not affect the significance of the interaction between financial intermediation and initial per capita GDP, and do not show any independent effect on convergence in our cross-country regressions. Our findings are robust to removal of outliers and to alternative conditioning sets, estimation procedures and measures of financial development.

The Effect of Financial Development on Convergence: Theory and Evidence

We introduce imperfect creditor protection in a multi-country version of Schumpeterian growth theory with technology transfer. The theory predicts that the growth rate of any country with more than some critical level of financial development will converge to the growth rate of the world technology frontier, and that all other countries will have a strictly lower long-run growth rate. The theory also predicts that in a country that converges to the frontier growth rate, financial development has a positive but eventually vanishing effect on steady-state per-capita GDP relative to the frontier. We present cross-country evidence supporting these two implications. In particular, we find a significant and sizeable effect of an interaction term between initial per-capita GDP (relative to the United States) and a financial intermediation measure in an otherwise standard growth regression, implying that the likelihood of converging to the U.S. growth rate increases with financial development. We also find that, as predicted by the theory, the direct effect of financial intermediation in this regression is not significantly different from zero. These findings are robust to alternative conditioning sets, estimation procedures and measures of financial development.

When Does Domestic Saving Matter for Economic Growth?

Can a country grow faster by saving more? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. In our theoretical model, growth results from innovations that allow local sectors to catch up with frontier technology. In poor countries, catching up requires the cooperation of a foreign investor who is familiar with the frontier technology and a domestic entrepreneur who is familiar with local conditions. In such a country, domestic saving matters for innovation, and therefore growth, because it enables the local entrepreneur to put equity into this cooperative venture, which mitigates an agency problem that would otherwise deter the foreign investor from participating. In rich countries, domestic entrepreneurs are already familiar with frontier technology and therefore do not need to attract foreign investment to innovate, so domestic saving does not matter for growth. A cross-country regression shows that lagged savings is positively associated with productivity growth in poor countries but not in rich countries. The same result is found when the regression is run on data generated by a calibrated version of our theoretical model.Savings, growth, technology adoption, TFP, FDI

Appropriate Growth Policy: A Unifying Framework

In this lecture, we use Schumpeterian growth theory, where growth comes from quality-improving innovations, to elaborate a theory of growth policy and to explain the growth gap between Europe and the US. Our theoretical apparatus systematizes the case-by-case approach to growth policy design. The emphasis is on three policy areas that are potentially relevant for growth in Europe, namely: competition and entry, education, and macropolicy. We argue that higher entry and exit (higher firm turnover) and increased emphasis on higher education are more growth-enhancing in countries that are closer to the technological frontier. We also argue that countercyclical budgetary policies are more growth-enhancing in countries with lower financial development. The analysis thus points to important interaction effects between policies and state variables, such as distance to frontier or financial development, in growth regressions. Finally, we argue that the other endogenous growth models, namely the AK and product variety models, fail to account for the evidence on the relationship between competition, education, volatility, and growth, and consequently cannot deliver relevant policy prescriptions in the three areas we consider.Economic

Ajustement macroéconomique aux technologies multi-usages

Cet article examine les effets macroéconomiques résultant de l’introduction de ce que Bresnahan et Trajtenberg appellent une « technologie multi-usages » (TMU) comme, par exemple, la technologie informatique. L’analyse est basée sur le principe qu’une nouvelle TMU accélère le rythme de changement technologique en créant une vague d’innovations secondaires destinées à améliorer et à atteindre le potentiel de la TMU d’origine. Cet article étudie les voies à travers lesquelles une hausse du rythme de changement technologique pourrait réduire le niveau d’activité économique mesuré avant de conduire l’économie à un niveau de croissance supérieur. Deux voies sont l’obsolescence du capital et l’absence de mesure de l’investissement de la connaissance dans les comptes nationaux. Un modèle de croissance endogène simple qui a été construit et adapté à l’économie américaine prévoit que l’obsolescence du capital est la plus significative des deux voies, et que, dans ce cas, la production sera pendant près de trois décennies inférieure à ce qu’elle aurait été sans l’introduction de la nouvelle TMU.This paper examines the macroeconomic effects that follow from the introduction of what Bresnahan and Trajtenberg have called a "general-purpose technology" (GPT), such as the computer. The analysis is based on the idea that a new GPT accelerates the pace of technological change by spawning a wave of secondary innovations aimed at improving upon and realizing the potential of the original GPT. The paper analyzes the channels through which such an increase in the pace of technological change might reduce the measured level of economic activity for some period before it ultimately brings the economy to a higher growth path. Two such channels are capital-obsolescence and the failure to measure knowledge-investment in the national accounts. A simple endogenous growth model that was constructed and calibrated to the US economy, predicts that capital-obsolescence is the more significant of the two channels, and that through this channel, output can fall below its no-shock path for almost 3 decades after the introduction of a new GPT

Banks, Market Organization, and Macroeconomic Performance: An Agent-Based Computational Analysis

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the role that banks play in supporting what Jevons called the mechanism of exchange. It considers a model economy in which exchange activities are facilitated and coordinated by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms. Collectively, these firms play the part of the Walrasian auctioneer, matching buyers with sellers and helping the economy to approximate equilibrium prices that no individual is able to calculate. Banks affect macroeconomic performance in this economy because their lending activities facilitate entry of trading firms and also influence their exit decisions. Both entry and exit have conflicting effects on performance, and we resort to computational analysis to understand how they are resolved. Our analysis sheds new light on the conflict between micro-prudential bank regulation and macroeconomic stability. Specifically, it draws an important difference between "normal" performance of the economy and "worst-case" scenarios, and shows that micro prudence conflicts with macro stability only in bad times. The analysis also shows that banks provide a "financial stabilizer" that in some respects can more than counteract the more familiar financial accelerator.Agent-based computational model, Market organization, Bank regulation, Macroeconomic stability, Financial stabilizer

When Does Domestic Saving Matter for Economic Growth?

Can a country grow faster by saving more? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. In our model, growth results from innovations that allow local sectors to catch up with the frontier technology. In relatively poor countries, catching up with the frontier requires the involvement of a foreign investor, who is familiar with the frontier technology, together with effort on the part of a local bank, who can directly monitor local projects to which the technology must be adapted. In such a country, local saving matters for innovation, and therefore growth, because it allows the domestic bank to cofinance projects and thus to attract foreign investment. But in countries close to the frontier, local firms are familiar with the frontier technology, and therefore do not need to attract foreign investment to undertake an innovation project, so local saving does not matter for growth. In our empirical exploration we show that lagged savings is significantly associated with productivity growth for poor but not for rich countries. This effect operates entirely through TFP rather than through capital accumulation. Further, we show that savings is significantly associated with higher levels of FDI inflows and equipment imports and that the effect that these have on growth is significantly larger for poor countries than rich.