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Three essays on technological spillovers, innovation, and economic growth
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays dealing with international trade, technological spillovers and growth. The first essay is concerned with the effect of trade liberalization on economic growth. Different from other papers in this literature a Malmquist estimation procedure is applied on a set of 150 countries. A smoothed bootstrapping procedure is used to generate a pseudo distribution of Malmquist scores allowing for statistical inference. Results show that higher volumes of trade are associated with increased rates of total factor productivity (TFP) change. It is shown that this connection only holds for countries with a large volume of trade and high GDP per capita. This result supports the idea of threshold levels of gains from international trade. Only countries with sufficiently good infrastructure and institutions have the ability to benefit from trade liberalization. The second essay deals with the theoretical literature on determinants of gains from trade liberalization in endogenous growth models. The literature is categorized into learning-by-doing models and models with investment into R&D by profit maximizing economic agents. Models in each of these categories are further categorized as models with complete spillovers, one sided spillovers, or limited spillovers. The results show that the degree of knowledge spillovers is a main determinant of gains from trade liberalization. The third essay measures the degree of technological spillovers from developed countries to developing countries, and between sectors within developing countries. Two different methodologies are used to estimate technological spillovers. The first approach uses the non-parametric Malmquist methodology to calculate the TFP change for the US and seven Latin American countries. The results of this estimation are regressed on various technology changing variables. The second approach uses a cross-section time-series analysis on a production function with variable elasticity of output with respect to each input. The results confirm the existence of both international and well as sectoral spillovers. Spillovers from agriculture to manufacturing are stronger than vice versa. This potentially argues for an increased role of agriculture in domestic support programs.
Subject Area
Economics
Recommended Citation
Czap, Hans Jorg, "Three essays on technological spillovers, innovation, and economic growth" (2006). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3216431.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3216431