Jeong-Dong Lee - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

Creative Accumulation examines how nations build the capabilities required for sustained technological leadership, moving beyond simple catch-up growth. Drawing on Korea's long-term development experience, Jeong-Dong Lee introduces the concept of the "middle innovation trap", a condition in which countries achieve high levels of implementation capability yet struggle to generate original concepts, architectures, and design leadership.The book argues that original concept design is not the product of individual genius or sudden breakthroughs but the outcome of creative accumulation. Creative accumulation requires posing bold question, persistently accumulating trial-and-error experiences, and scaling up from ideas to viable outcomes. Integrating insights from innovation theory, evolutionary economics, and industrial policy, Jeong-Dong Lee shows how these processes of creative accumulation enable nations to become technology leaders.Although the book draws its evidence from the trajectory of Korean industry and technology, Korea's experience represents a compelling and instructive case of a broader developmental process. Drawing on decades of engagement with government and business, Lee shows that countries which fail to build solid implementation capability tend to fall into the middle income trap. Yet even countries that escape this may encounter the middle innovation trap if they fail to develop concept design capability, resulting in renewed stagnation. To transition out of this phase demands sustained, national-level efforts from firms, governments, and institutions. Creative Accumulation offers concrete policy prescriptions for overcoming the middle innovation trap, grounded in coordinated, mission-oriented, and long-term strategies that can guide nations at every stage of development.

Productivity growth is a keyword for sustainable economic growth in a knowledge-based society. There has been significant methodological development in the literature on productivity and efficiency analysis, e.g. SFA (Stochastic Frontier Analysis) and DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis). All these methodological developments should be matched with applications in order to provide practical implications for private and public decision-makers. This volume provides a collection of up-to-date and new applications of productivity and efficiency analysis. In particular, the case studies cover various economic issues in the Asia-Pacific region. The authors analyze the performance of manufacturing firms, banks, venture capital, broadcasting firms, as well as the issues of efficiency in the education sector, regional development, and defense industry. These case studies will shed light on the potential contribution of productivity and efficiency analysis to the enhancement of economic performance.