Cross-country technology adoption: making the theories face the facts

Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn

No 169, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: We examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world's leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for the period 1788-2001. We document the common patterns observed in the diffusion of this broad range of technologies. ; Our results suggest a pattern of trickle-down diffusion that is remarkably robust across technologies. Most of the technologies that we consider originate in advanced economies and are adopted there first. Subsequently, they trickle down to countries that lag economically. Our panel data analysis indicates that the most important determinants of the speed at which a country adopts technologies are the country's human capital endowment, type of government, degree of openness to trade, and adoption of predecessor technologies. We also find that the overall rate of diffusion has increased markedly since World War II because of the convergence in these variables across countries.

Keywords: Economic history; Technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (67)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr169.html (text/html)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr169.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cross-country technology adoption: making the theories face the facts (2004)
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:fednsr:169

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().