International technology diffusion through imports and its impact on economic growth

Abstract

This paper provides new evidence on the importance of international technology spillovers channelled by imports and its impact on economic TFP growth of the OECD countries. For this purpose we estimate a version of the growth model with endogenous technological change used in Benhabib and Spiegel (1994), which includes some modifications in order to capture the differences in the degree of success that countries have in benefiting from foreign technology spillovers. Our results suggest that domestic R&D and human capital stocks are critical for successful technology diffusion from abroad.