Engines of Growth: Domestic and Foreign Sources of Innovation
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- preprint Published in RePEc
Abstract
We examine productivity growth since World War II in the five leading research economies: West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States. Available data on the capital-output ratio suggests that these countries grew as they did because of their ability to adopt more productive technologies, not because of capital deepening per se. We present a multicountry model of tech- nological innovation and diffusion which has the implication that, for a wide range of parameter values, countries converge to a common growth rate, with relative productivities depending on the speed with which countries adopt technologies developed at home and abroad. Using parameter values that fit a cross section of data on productivity, research, and patenting, we simulate the growth of the five countries, given initial productivity levels in 1950 and research efforts in the sub- sequent four decades. Based on plausible assumptions about "technology gaps" that existed among these countries in 1950 we can explain their growth experi- ences quite successfully. Specifically, the simulations capture the magnitude of the slowdown in German, French, and Japanese productivity growth and the relative constancy of U.K. and U.S. growth.Keywords
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