Creating Competition? Globalisation and the Emergence of New Technology Producers

By Suma Athreye, John A. Cantwell. 2005

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies the emergence of new countries as contributors to technology generation in the world economy and assesses the relationship between this and globalisation (through trade, inward FDI and international migration). It considers two measures of technology generation, viz. a country's share of licensing revenues and of foreign origin patenting in the US, thus covering different phases and aspects of technological catch-up across countries. The paper uses a novel index to track the influence of new countries as technology generators in these datasets and uses time series techniques to understand the causal relationship between globalisation and the emergence of new technology producers. Our findings suggest a role for increasing international direct investment as a factor causing the emergence of new countries with the higher level competitiveness associated with patenting, but not in the recent surge of new countries with the basic capabilities needed to become licensors in the world economy. However, an increase in the international spread of the subsidiary sources of the patenting activity of multinationals appears to follow periods when the world economy becomes less open to trade.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3808dea9568f94f803a910e9cd5797c6d46a057d

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Citations in the corpus

Human capital, R&D, trade, and long-run productivity. Testing the technological absorption hypothesis for the Portuguese economy, 1960–2001 (2010, background): “Athreye and Cantwell (2007) argue that the international knowledge connections provided by FDI tend to precede and thus facilitate catching-up at higher levels of technological sophistication—FDI promotes technological catch-up among countries that have already acquired sufficient absorptive…”
The impact of R&D offshoring on the home knowledge production of OECD investing regions (2012, background): “The increasing internationalization of economic activities is being accompanied by changes to the location of overseas innovative activities (UNCTAD, 2005) with significant proportions of R&D going to developing Asia (Beausang, 2004)—to countries that have emerged as new technology producers (Athrey”
Technology Acquisition in Family and Nonfamily Firms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Spanish Manufacturing Firms (2013, background): “Managers increasingly rate patents as an effective means of protecting some parts of the firm’s product invention against rivals’ divergent interests, which is supported by the strong growth in international patenting since the late 1980s (Athreye and Cantwell, 2007).”
Ideas for rent: an overview of markets for technology (2010, methodology): “5 the acceleration in Athreye and Cantwell’s (2007) data is probably less marked.”
The Internationalization of Corporate R&D: A Review of the Evidence and Some Policy Implications for Home Countries1 (2009, background): “Since the early 1980s, the rapid growth of arm’s length markets for IP has broadened the opportunities of the emerging players to also take part in the cross-border interfirm business networks for knowledge exchange (Athreye & Cantwell, 2007).”
The market for patents in Europe (2007, background): “A natural reason is that technology licensing has increased considerably worldwide during the 1990s (e.g. Athreye and Cantwell, 2005) following a greater emphasis of company strategies on technology exchange through arms-length market transactions, strategic alliances, or crosslicensing agreements…”
Innovation and international business (2017, background): “The emergence of more decentralized international MNE networks for innovation, and an increasing fragmentation of production systems, have opened up new opportunities for at least some developing countries to catch up technologically (Ernst 2002, 2005; Ernst and Kim 2002; Athreye and Cantwell 2007).”
Patent Thickets, Licensing and Innovative Performance (2010, background): “Increases in patenting also appear to have been accompanied by a concomitant increase in licensing activity (Athreye and Cantwell (2007)), suggesting that part of the explosion in patenting reflects expansion of the “market for technology.”