Technological and information transfer: How do some nations learn what other nations know? Japan's experience

Abstract

Abstract The returns to the rapid acceleration in the growth of gross global product per capita in the past century and a quarter have been very inequitably distributed across nations. Nations that were already relatively wealthy in 1870 have received most of the benefits of this increase in material well‐being. Japan is thus far the only major example of a country that has been able to fully traverse the vast gulf that separates poorer from wealthier nations. Lately other economies in East Asia have experienced such sustained high rates of growth in gross domestic product per capita as to suggest they too will join Japan as non‐Western examples of the world's wealthiest nations. Some doubt has been cast on these optimistic projections by findings that economies such as Taiwan and Korea have grown rapidly, seemingly Soviet‐bloc style, without the benefit of rapid growth in total factor productivity change. Characterizing growth without total factor productivity change as Stalinist, however, is ahistorical...