ایجاد رقابت: جهانی شدن و ظهور تولیدکنندگان فن آوری های نوین

This paper studies the role of globalisation (through trade, inward FDI and international migration) in the emergence of new countries as contributors to technology generation in the world economy. Increasing FDI is a factor causing the emergence of newer countries with the more sophisticated technology generation associated with patenting, but not in the recent surge of newer countries with the basic capabilities needed to become licensors in the world economy. Yet increases in the international spread of subsidiary research efforts in MNCs have tended on average to reinforce the position of established centres of higher grade technological activity.

There is considerable debate on the issue of whether new countries in the developing world are catching-up in technological capabilities and if they can emerge as significant producers of technology. Case studies suggest that countries like Ireland, Israel and India have emerged as significant exporters of technologically sophisticated products and services. A significant proportion of multinational company R&D has moved to countries of developing Asia—estimates suggest that the share of US affiliate R&D in Canada, Japan and Europe relative to the world as a whole decreased from 94% in 1989 to 85% in 1999, while the share of developing Asia grew from less than 1% to over 7.7%.1 Yet our knowledge remains limited of whether this transfer of R&D has been associated with technological generation from new countries to a significant extent. However, we also live in times when the unprecedented globalisation of the last two decades is under threat. On the one hand, researchers concerned with the development of poor countries in Africa are campaigning for Developed Market Economies to open a larger part of their market. Larger developing countries such as India and Brazil have also intervened aggressively for a fair deal in trading during the Doha and Cancun rounds of the WTO negotiations. On the other hand, recent trends in the outsourcing of intellectual labour have given rise to the fear in Developed Market Economies that they stand to lose their comparative advantage in knowledge-intensive products as new countries emerge with the basic capabilities needed to provide some technology-based services. At least two recent works on international trade by eminent economists argue that these fears may be well founded. Gomroy and Baumol (2000) show that in a multi-country, multi-product setting where international trade is based mostly on created comparative advantages and economies of scale, the terms of trade consequences of productivity improvements among trading partners may be such that the classical argument that free trade benefits all countries is overturned. In a similar vein, Samuelson (2004) has argued that productivity growth in trading partners may sometimes ‘permanently harm’ the trading country. These concerns about the possibilities and consequences of productivity growth in trading partners are also closely related to the discussion of technological catch-up of developing economies, especially in the context of North-South trade. Increases in productivity in developing economies often start with simple technology transfer type activities, facilitated by openness and then proceed through investments by firms in capability building (within economies of the South) to become distinctive niches that underlie the competitive advantages of these nations. There are two reasons to expect that the relationship between technological catch-up and globalisation vary with whether countries are at earlier stages of development that require simpler capabilities, or have entered a more mature phase of development that relies on sophisticated capabilities. First, when building simpler capabilities smaller firms may play a more prominent independent entrepreneurial role, and there is less need for organisational complexity and interconnected network structures. Therefore, earlier technological catch-up relies less upon a system for sustained and continuous international knowledge exchanges and interdependencies (of the kind that are facilitated by trade and FDI), but depends more in the first instance upon indigenous learning efforts. Second, the recent rise in technology trade and the outsourcing of knowledge-related functions that has accompanied the fragmentation of value chains has created new opportunities for those with at least basic capabilities in what were formerly less well internationally interconnected locations, especially in developing countries. Some countries with basic capabilities may thus now be able to establish new niches for themselves in international knowledge creation that does not depend on an already prevailing system of trade and FDI. Our paper aims to contribute to these debates and their concerns. Its novelty lies in providing a quantitative assessment of the periods when new countries emerged as technology producers (thus demonstrating technological catch-up), and assessing how different phases and dimensions of technological catch-up are related to globalisation. We are able to distinguish between the earlier phases of technological catch-up that rely on the building of simpler capabilities, by utilising a new source of data, viz. cross-border licensing revenue data. The attainment of higher level technology based competitiveness is captured (as in other work on the subject) by the inventive sources of patenting. The paper pays attention to different dimensions of globalisation in the world economy—openness to trade, share of foreign direct investment (FDI), the use of international locations as sources for patenting by multinational corporations (MNCs), and the proportion of the world's population that migrated between countries. Indeed, our empirical findings suggest a strong role for increasing inward direct investment in the world economy as a factor inducing the emergence of new countries as patentees (which usually does require international knowledge interdependencies), but only some ambiguous evidence that greater openness to international trade explains the recent surge of new countries as licensors in the world economy. We interpret the latter finding as suggestive of the important role played by exogenous factors such as the emergence of generic technologies that have facilitated the growth of technology trade often in intangibles as argued by Athreye (1998) and Arora et al. (2001). However, patenting by MNCs from international sources (that is, from the innovative efforts of their subsidiaries abroad) is enhanced by a weakening of the possibilities for trade. This is what we would expect from internalisation theory of the MNC (Buckley and Casson, 1976), but it may also be the case even without the internalisation of a former market (trade) connection that when openness to trade declines, host countries rely to a greater extent on a local presence by the subsidiaries of foreign-owned MNCs to foster technology creation, as opposed to international business knowledge linkages that come through trade and subcontracting. However, when international knowledge linkages are created through FDI, it facilitates the consolidation of higher level capabilities locally, even though FDI is not usually the means by which lower level capabilities are initially built up in the earlier stages of development. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the view that multinationals require the presence of local capabilities and infrastructure before they invest (Lall, 2001), and that they tend in recent times to have followed knowledge-based asset-seeking strategies to reinforce their competitive strengths as argued by authors such as Cantwell (1995), Dunning (1996), Makino et al. (2002), Pearce (1999) and Wesson (2005). Indeed, we argue that the shift within the existing international networks of MNCs towards competence-creating activities (and hence to more patents that are attributable to the international facilities of MNCs) is – initially, at least – likely to reinforce the innovative strengths of established technology producers. This is because competence-creating subsidiaries need to be more closely embedded within local networks (Birkinshaw et al., 1998 and Andersson et al., 2002), and an increased intensity of knowledge exchanges between local actors in these networks tends to create a virtuous cycle of growth in innovation in those favoured locations that have attracted high quality FDI. The remainder of the paper is organised as follows: a brief review of the literature on the emergence of new technology producing countries and regions in Section 1, is followed in Section 2 by an outline of the method employed in our study, including a description of the method used to track technological catch-up in the world economy. Section 3 describes our main results and Section 4 concludes.

In this paper we use measures of technological catch-up in the world economy to try and assess what periods of catch-up there have been, as well as to assess to what extent globalisation causes changes in catch-up. These trends differ depending upon whether we look at the geographical dispersal of the more sophisticated capabilities associated with patent shares or the wider range of capabilities reflected by licensing (receipt) shares. Patenting shows evidence of technological catch-up of a more sophisticated kind in the 1950s and 1960s and again in the period 1992–2001. However, licensing receipts show a secular trend towards the emergence of new countries starting from the mid-1980s onwards and gathering speed in the 1990s. We speculate that this trend may be related to the new opportunities for niche strategies connected with the increasing importance of knowledge-intensive services since the 1980s, which have been noted by several scholars (such as Arora et al., 2001). Studying the impact of globalisation in explaining the emergence of newer producers of technology we again find distinct results for the different types of technological efforts associated with patenting and licensing (receipt) shares. In the case of patenting we find evidence that inward FDI matters for the catch-up of newer technology producers with the higher level capabilities needed. MNC patenting from international sources and international migration also matter—but they promote greater concentration of patent shares by tending to reinforce the status of established centres of excellence, and so on average they constrain the incidence of higher levels of technological catch-up across countries. The result on the effects of international migration in concentrating technology production is interesting as the examples of Taiwan, Ireland, Israel and India have often been used to suggest the advantages of diasporic migration through ethnic knowledge networks in research-based sectors. The aggregate results of this paper – perhaps more micro disaggregated evidence that separates out different country effects would be necessary – do not suggest any role on average for diasporas, although of course, our measure of international migration is crude in that our data do not distinguish between the migration of technically skilled versus unskilled people. Looking at licensing shares, however, the influence that we have observed running from greater openness in the world economy to the emergence and catch-up of newer countries as licensees does not appear to be robust, as it holds only in our VAR analysis and not in the tests of Granger causality. This disparity suggests that increases in openness have themselves been associated with the emergence and growth of at least basic technological generating capacity in some developing countries, which may well have helped lead them to be better disposed towards greater openness in trade. The implication of our findings on FDI is that FDI is not on average across countries a key development tool in the initial stages of technological capability development, but it begins to play a role only in later, more advanced stages. Purposeful technological efforts, such as private sector R&D, and conducive government policies may play a central role in basic development and the subsequent upgrading of technological activity in particular countries, as revealed by notable Asian experiences (e.g. South Korea, Singapore, and modern China) but they are not captured by the globalisation variables we measure. Lastly, despite the lack of any clear causal direction in the effect of changes in the openness of the world economy on the emergence and growth of lower level newer technology producers, we do find that openness influences two other variables of globalisation, namely international migration (positively) and the internationalisation of research in MNCs (inversely). More open periods are also periods of higher international migration. However, a reduction in openness in the world economy predicts an increase in the extent of MNC patenting from international sources, and perhaps from new locations (and vice versa), since more the intense local network linkages associated with greater subsidiary embeddedness to some extent substitutes for international trade connections. Yet both greater international migration and the international dispersal of technological creativity within MNCs tend in turn to imply the net consolidation of technological knowledge creation of the more sophisticated kind in fewer countries, albeit by means of drawing upon resources from outside the established home bases of the largest MNCs, although probably still on average in other established centres of excellence. Our results are also suggestive of a general pattern in the linkages between globalisation and technological catch-up that may not be true of all countries at all times, but which has been observed on average in the post-war period. That is, in the earlier stages of capability development, catch-up relies mainly on a localised and indigenous learning that is not closely interconnected with current knowledge creation elsewhere in the world, and so does not rely on prior FDI. In this earlier phase of development general openness on the demand side in the form of connections through trade and the availability of intellectual property markets is a more important influence upon the potential for catch-up. However, once basic capabilities are formed, locations can begin to act as creative nodes within global production networks, initially more commonly through trade and subcontracting linkages, rather than through FDI. Yet when the scope of international trade and subcontracting networks are reduced, the role of local subsidiaries in knowledge-creating nodes is likely to be increased. That is, the wider dispersion of knowledge-generating capabilities by multinational firms comes to take advantage of new potential sources of ideas and begins to integrate them more fully into their international corporate networks. The tendency for increases in the international spread of subsidiary research efforts in MNCs to reinforce on average the position of established centres of higher grade technological activity, may be due to the increased intensity of knowledge exchanges between the key actors within local networks as subsidiaries become more technologically creative. Indeed, when moving on to the higher levels of technological development needed for the later stages of catch-up, the adequacy of local supply side infrastructure becomes critical, and participation in the international interconnectedness of knowledge networks provided by MNCs through FDI is more likely to be a precondition for catch-up.