The globalization of ideas

Anthony Landry ()

Economic Letter, 2010, vol. 5, issue nov, No 11

Abstract: Globalization is the process of increasing economic interdependence among nations. It is reflected in the growth of cross-border trade in goods and services. Ideas, like goods and services, also flow across borders and their globalization is well under way. ; Quantifying that flow is difficult; however, patent filings can provide indirect evidence on the production of ideas. Further, cross-border patenting--the patenting of one idea in several countries--can help trace the flow of ideas. What we learn from those data is that idea production has taken off in the developing BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and that exports and imports of ideas have grown substantially. This is happening not just in the BRICs, but also in the countries that have been the traditional locus of global idea production: the U.S., Germany and Japan. ; Because ideas are intangible, measuring the impact of imported ideas on a country?s economic well-being is challenging. Imported ideas can, however, arrive in a physical form--most importantly as new capital goods--whose impact on economic growth can be measured. Drawing on recent research, we can conclude that imports of capital goods have accounted for a sizeable fraction of the growth in U.S. labor productivity since the late 1960s.

Keywords: technological innovations; Globalization; Patents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/6362/item/607644 Full Text (text/html)

Related works:
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:fip:feddel:y:2010:i:nov:n:v.5no.11

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Letter from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Chapman ().