Perpetual leapfrogging in international competition

Abstract

Technological leadership has shifted at various times from one country to another. This analysis proposes a mechanism that endogenously explains this perpetual cycle of technological leapfrogging by incorporating international knowledge spillovers into a two-country dynamic model of innovation with the dynamic optimization of an infinitely-lived consumer. In the model, innovation productivity in each country endogenously increases over time because of domestic learning-by-doing and learning from foreign capital. The analysis shows that if international spillovers through learning from foreign capital are sufficiently large, technological leadership may first shift from one country to another, and then perpetually alternate between the two countries