The political reception of innovations

Jeffry Frieden and Arthur Silve

Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques

Abstract: Why do some societies embrace innovative technologies, policies, and ideas, while others are slow to adopt, or even resist, them? We focus on features of an innovation that are expected to affect the incumbent elite's economic activities, and hence the elite's reaction. The elite can choose whether to appropriate the innovation for itself; encourage its adoption; tax, regulate, or limit or block it. Six features of the innovation affect the elite response: i) whether it is easy to replicate; ii) whether it complements or competes with the elite's sources of income; iii) whether its impact is broad or narrow; iv) whether it is location-dependent, and v) concealable; vi) whether it requires large fixed costs. Some of these factors have been considered in other work; here we assess them together. We provide illustrative evidence of the relevance and generality of the model to understand the fate of a variety of innovations.

Keywords: : innovation; regulation; rent-seeking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 L50 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-pay and nep-tid
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Related works:
Journal Article: The political reception of innovations (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:crrecr:2105

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