تجارت در فن آوری پاشیده و بهره وری کل عوامل در کشورهای OECD

This paper searches for evidence of the importance of international trade in disembodied technology as a specific diffusion mechanism, using a sample of 16 OECD countries from 1971 to 1995. Consistent with previous research, this paper finds that there is international diffusion of technology. The measure for international trade in technology is OECD's Technology Balance of Payments statistics, which are country-level data on international transactions of disembodied technology. The econometric analysis explicitly takes into account non-stationarity of the variables, and for this reason, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) is the estimation method used in the present study. The analysis shows that the effect of trade in disembodied technology on the importer's productivity varies across countries. Specifically, within OECD countries not in the G7 group, technology imports increase the host-country's total factor productivity, with the effect being stronger in the initial years of the sampling period. There is no evidence on this positive effect of technology trade on productivity in the case of G7 countries.

The transmission of technology across countries takes a wide variety of forms. Technology can be embodied in intermediate inputs, capital goods, or people; it can be purchased and sold in disembodied form; or it can diffuse by other means, such as imitation. This paper specifically focuses on international trade in disembodied technology as a diffusion channel. In 2005, the U.S. sold $57.4 billion and purchased $23.2 billion worth of disembodied technology, comprising both affiliated and unaffiliated transactions. Imported technology is expected to have a positive effect on the host-country's productivity for several reasons. First, total factor productivity (TFP) may increase simply because firms using a superior technology raise average productivity. Second, these firms may foster competition among domestic firms, leading to the survival of the most efficient ones. Additionally, imported technology may be imitated by local competitors, or even by the licensee once the licensing contract expires. Regardless of the specific mechanism by which a superior technology increases productivity, differences in TFP partially explain cross-country differences in income per worker (see for instance Hall and Jones, 1999). Hence, the identification of the mechanisms by which TFP increases is very relevant in order to understand the development of nations.

The purpose of this paper is to complement the existing literature on international diffusion of technology by assessing the importance of trade in disembodied technology as a channel for the international transmission of technology. Consistent with previous literature, this paper finds a strong and significant effect of domestic R&D on local productivity. This effect is robust to variations in the specification and to the inclusion of other variables that might have an effect on productivity. Furthermore, this effect is found to be stronger in G7 countries.