Technological Accumulation and Industrial Growth: Contrasts Between Developed and Developing Countries

Several areas of economic analysis have given renewed attention during the 1980s to the long run importance of technological learning and technical change. These issues have become a central feature in the new trade and growth theories (e.g. Krugman, 1986; Lucas, 1988; Grossman and Helpman, 1990; Romer, 1986, 1990). They have emerged as one of the major factors explaining differences among the developed countries in growth and trade performance (e.g. Fagerberg, 1987, 1988;Cantwell, 1989), and they underlie analyses of the extent to which, as a result of differing growth paths, economies with different initial income levels have been converging or diverging over time (e.g. Abramovitz, 1986; Baumol, 1986; De Long, g 1988; Dowrick and Gemmell, 1991). This paper contributes to these areas of debate. It draws heavily on the j understanding of technological accumulation in the industrialized world in I order to illuminate the situation in contemporary developing countries. N And, since the basic processes of technological accumulation and technical | change differ fundamentally between the agricultural and industrial sectors I in low income economies, it focuses on the industrial sector. This is the sector in which, at least relative to earlier expectations, disappointment at the realized extent of'catching up' over the last four or five decades is perhaps I greatest. o Even at the beginning of that period, it was widely recognized that there ' were difficulties in transferring agricultural technologies from developed to