Diversification, Innovation, and Imitation Inside the Global Technological Frontier
By B. Klinger, D. Lederman. 2006
210 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export"discoveries,"or inside-the-frontier innovations in developing countries. They then explore the empirical relationship between economic development and (1) inside-the-frontier-innovation as reflected by the introduction of new export products, (2) export diversification measured by an index of export-revenue concentration, and (3) on-the-frontier innovation as reflected in patents. The data suggest, unsurprisingly, that inside-the-frontier innovation is more common among poor countries than among industrial economies. Overall export diversification increases at low levels of development but declines with development after a high-income point, whereas patenting activity rises exponentially with development. The data also suggest that the relationship between the frequency of export discoveries and economic development is not due to changes in the industrial composition of exports. The authors use a simple model of innovation and imitation to test the hypothesis that the threat of imitation inhibits the discovery of new exports. Econometric evidence suggests that the frequency of export discoveries across countries rises with the returns of export activities (proxied by exogenous export growth during the sample period), but the magnitude of this effect increases with barriers to entry. The count-data estimations deal with unobserved international heterogeneity, and the results are robust to various changes in the specification of the empirical model. This finding supports the hypothesisthat market failures inhibit inside-the-frontier innovation.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7a6f835e7a27c05d62cc3abe84661b03dfcc020
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Product export diversification and sustainable economic growth in developing countries (2019, background): “…observation of the quadratic relationship has been extended to the relationship between export diversification and level of development (Klinger and Lederman, 2006; Parteka, 2007; Easterly, Reshef and Schwenkenberg, 2009; Cadot et al., 2013): the first stage of economic development is…”
- Trade Facilitation and Export Diversification (2011, unknown): “15Our results for market entry costs might appear to contrast with those of Klinger and Lederman (2006).”