Technology and Economic Development

Daron Acemoglu (), Ufuk Akcigit and Simon Johnson ()
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Daron Acemoglu: MIT, Department of Economics
Simon Johnson: MIT, Sloan School of Management

No 2026-12, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: This chapter presents a tractable framework for the study of technology adoption and diffusion in the context of economic development. Firms in countries behind the world technology frontier can rapidly adopt new techniques from the world frontier. Lower absorptive capacity (because of weak education systems, poor management practices, or barriers to technology adoption), institutional distortions, mismatch between frontier technologies and the needs of firms in the country (i.e., “inappropriate technology†), and credit market frictions slow down technology adoption and cause the economy in question to have a greater distance to the frontier and thus lower income per capita—although the long-run growth rate of the country still remains equal to that of the frontier. This framework is extended to study the choice between innovation and imitation, as well as the role of selection for higher-productivity and higher-absorptive capacity firms during the process of economic development. We illustrate the main comparative statics of our framework with a number of correlations based on cross-country and firm-level data. The tractability of the framework makes it amenable to a range of additional extensions.

Keywords: technology adoption; innovation; income gap; institutions; economic growth; development; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2026
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Working Paper: Technology and Economic Development (2026)
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