Technological Change and the Wealth of Nations

Gino Gancia and Fabrizio Zilibotti

Annual Review of Economics, 2009, vol. 1, issue 1, 93-120

Abstract: We discuss a unified theory of directed technological change and technology adoption that can shed light on the causes of persistent productivity differences across countries. In our model, new technologies are designed in advanced countries and diffuse endogenously to less developed countries. Our framework is rich enough to highlight three broad reasons for productivity differences: inappropriate technologies, policy-induced barriers to technology adoption, and within-country misallocations across sectors due to policy distortions. We also discuss the effects of two aspects of globalization, trade in goods and migration, on the wealth of nations through their impact on the direction of technical progress. By doing so, we illustrate some of the equalizing and unequalizing forces of globalization.

Keywords: technology adoption; directed technical change; inappropriate technologies; globalization; skill bias; TFP differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F02 F11 J11 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.economics.050708.143333 (application/pdf)
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
Working Paper: Technological Change and the Wealth of Nations (2009)
Working Paper: Technological change and the wealth of nations (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reveco:v:1:y:2009:p:93-120

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().