Rapid Technical Change Research Articles

Information And Communication Technology And The Measurement Of Volume Output And Final Demand - A Five-Country Study

Information and communication technology (ICT) products have undergone rapid technical change. Where quality improvements occur, they should be reflected in official price and quantity indices, otherwise there is a tendency to over-estimate price movements and under-estimate volume changes of ICT products. Statistical offices deal with this issue but the degree and nature of quality-adjustment of price indices of ICT products varies considerably between OECD countries. The present study simulates measurement effects on key economic variables (real output, private final consumption, government expenditure, investment, exports and imports) and productivity, under the assumption that the price indices of ICT products are fully quality-adjusted. The paper draws on a large selection of empirical studies to identify differences between quality-adjusted and unadjusted price changes and uses detailed information from input-output tables to assess their weights in final demand. Effects on GDP and its components are quantified for five selected OECD countries.

Technical Progress, Inefficiency, and Productivity Change in U.S. Banking, 1984-1993

Numerous studies have found that US commercial banks are quite inefficient, and we find that, on average, banks became more technically inefficient between 1984 and 1993. Our analysis of productivity change, however, shows that technological improvements adopted by a few banks pushed out the efficient frontier, and that, on average, commercial banks experienced productivity gains. For banks with assets less than 0 million, however, technological improvement was insufficient to offset increased inefficiency, and thus productivity declined over the period. Our findings suggest that increasing inefficiency is reflective of an industry undergoing rapid technical change and adjustment of average firm size, but not necessarily a long-term decline.

Strategic Behavior, Institutional Change, and the Future of Agriculture

Policy reforms that increase the roles of markets in agriculture and related institutional changes are occurring worldwide and are accompanied by rapid technical change. With the evolving role of government, new institutions are emerging for shaping the strategic behavior of public and private sector agents. This paper suggests that the use of game theoretic formulations, combined with modern concepts of mechanism design, offers an approach to policy analysis and the study of institutional change that is valuable to professionals involved in the economics of agriculture.

Technology and small-scale production

We face a future in which rapid technical change will affect developed countries as well as the modern sectors in developing countries; but in which the poor majority of developing countries will be excluded from most of the benefits of such change. As trade barriers are relaxed in the global market place poor small scale producers are obliged to compete next to businesses with access to equipment and knowledge of a far greater technical sophistication. This article points to the crucial role of technology for small-scale businesses and argues that market forces alone will not deliver the technologies that the poor need fast enough to prevent the gap widening between the modern sector (the 'included') and the traditional sector ('the excluded').

The Japanese Enterprise System: Competitive Strategies and Cooperative Structures.

This volume merges four streams of inquiry and interpretation in a study of the evolution and emergence of Japan's leading industrial firms during the twentieth century. First, it is a historical study of how the industrial institutions of modern Japan appeared and matured. Second, it is an organization study of the basic forms of social and economic interaction in Japan. Third, it is a development study of how circumstances of rapid technical and economic change have shaped the Japanese business system. It is also a strategy study of how Japanese managers have responded to and shaped these circumstances.

Explaining the Relative Decline of Agriculture: A Supply-Side Analysis for Indonesia

The relative decline of agriculture in growing economies is a central feature of economic development and a major influence on agricultural policies. The literature on the causes of this decline has focused on the relative price effects arising from demand factors, especially Engel's law, rather than on supply-side influences, such as changes in relative factor endowments and differential rates of technical change. This article develops a simple structural model of the transformation of the Indonesian economy, applying an error correction mechanism to capture the dynamics resulting from disequilibria and the costs of adjustment. The decline in agriculture's share of gross domestic product is found to be caused much less by the relative price effects typically emphasized in the literature than by capital accumulation and rapid technical change in agriculture.

Information and Communication Technologies and the Geography of Magazine Print Publishing

DRIVER S. And GILLESPIE A. (1993) Information and communication technologies and the geography of magazine print publishing, Reg. Studies 27, 53-64. Magazine print publishing is currently undergoing rapid technical change with the digitization of the printed word. This paper examines the implications of the new information and communication technologies for the geography of this sector within Britain. The established economic and spatial dynamics of magazine publishing are examined, and an assessment is made of the extent to which innovations in desktop publishing and advanced telecommunications are leading to new patterns of spatial structure in the industry. We argue that the new communication technologies are not leading to a general decentralization of magazine print publishing within Britain. For a variety of tangible and intangible reasons, the locational attractions of London remain dominant for the magazine publishers, while the geography of magazine markets make any further decentralization of ma...

Keeping pace with change: Organizational and technological imperatives

Manufacturing processes worldwide are being reconfigured by organizational innovations pioneered by the Japanese and by microelectronics-based technologies. We developed a cost model that simulated “factories” with several variations in production practices and technologies used. The results show that in a period of rapid technical change significant productivity differences can emerge between competing firms, even in “mature” sectors; these differences are amplified if learning across innovations is cumulative. The implications for developing countries are that efforts within the firm at organizational change need to be supplemented by close international relationships and appropriate infrastracture; a passive trust in the product cycle could be unhelpful.

Small-scale irrigation initiatives in Nigeria: the problems of equity and sustainability

Because of the repeated under-performance of large-scale irrigation over the last 20–30 years it is now widely perceived as having failed to reduce food deficits or significantly increase agricultural productivity in Africa. Many aid donors and state agencies, particularly in Nigeria, have become increasingly involved in informal small-scale irrigation and there has thus been rapid technical change in the methods used to lift groundwater. Using data from recent research undertaken in northern Nigeria, the question is posed as to whether the assumptions about the sustainability of technically improved small-scale irrigation have any basis in fact. It is shown that technical sustainability problems have already arisen in northern Nigeria and that there could be serious ecological and pedological problems in the future. It is also argued that because of its inherent inequity, small-scale irrigation is not suitable for effecting broad-based agricultural and/or rural development. With new small-scale irrigation technology being introduced and promoted by forces acting upon, but outside, the traditional agricultural sector, it should not be presumed that the growth so induced will be either organic or sustainable in the longer term.

ELECTRONIC INFORMATION: Storage, Communication, and Access

A user of information has three strategies for capturing, storing, and accessing information in electronic form: a personal collection, a local library, or a remote service. Each strategy embodies a different mix of storage cost, communication cost, and user effort. Rapid and radical technical changes in storage, communication, and access methods may be causing changes in the relative costs of the three strategies. As a consequence, libraries face the challenge of devising a collection policy for electronic documents in an evolving environment.

Economic impact and technical change

The technology decomposition theory is proposed for technologies that exhibit rapid technical change. This theory is intended to support technology forecasting by means of definition of the technical change in technology constituents. Technology decomposition shows that rapid technical change is mainly accomplished by improvements in the manufacturing process. The improvements are the result of the design of new production equipment. Measurements of technical change are used to derive a technology constituent value. It is proposed that the derived constituent value is the maximum achievable. This leads to implications for the management of technology in general and, specifically, for the management of product engineering, if the product depends on one or more rapidly changing technologies. >

Wage structures and labor turnover in the United States and Japan

The starting point of this study is the proposition that intensive formation of human capital on the job is the basic proximate reason for the strong degree of worker attachment to the firm in Japan. The greater emphasis on training and retraining, much of it specific to the firm, results also in steeper wage trajectories, due to growth of skills in the firm. Several previous studies viewed the differences between Japanese and U.S. labor markets in the light of the same hypothesis. We explore this insight more thoroughly by a detailed use of microdata for the two countries: we measure wage profiles and turnover in age groups and we test the inverse relation between the two on industry sectors within each of the countries. Numerical estimates of this relation permit us to conclude that as much as two-thirds of the differential in turnover between the two countries is explainable by the differences in the steepness of the profiles. The question remains why the emphasis on human capital formation on the job is so much greater in Japan than in the United States. Our answer is that such emphasis is conditioned by rapid economic growth. More specifically, Japanese labor policies in the firm represent adjustments of worker skills and activities to the very rapid technological changes of the past decades. Using productivity growth indexes for industries in the United States and Japan we test the hypothesis that rapid technical change, which induces greater and continuous training, is in part responsible for steeper profiles and for lesser turnover. The hypothesis is confirmed on the sectoral level in both countries. We conclude that differences in productivity growth between the United States and Japan account for up to 80% of the differences in the steepness of wage profiles, and indirectly for the differences in turnover. Finally, we try to standardize for the cultural background of workers, by observing a sample of Japanese plants in the United States which employ American workers and use Japanese labor policies in recruitment and training. We find that the steeper tenure-wage slopes and lower turnover place this sample closer to Japan than to the United States—about two-thirds of the distance.

Electric power plant in India A strategy of self-reliance

This paper examines the development of the Indian power plant sector in relation to the aims of promoting economic growth, import substitution, and international competitiveness. Particular attention is paid to Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL), a public enterprise which was established with extensive foreign assistance. Major difficulties were encountered in assimilating foreign technology, coping with rapid technical change, building up expertise in quality assurance, and research and development, obtaining satisfactory materials and components from Indian firms, and achieving satisfactory capacity utilization. Nevertheless, in production capacity and size of market, BHEL is increasingly comparable to the 10 or so suppliers that dominate the international market as well as their home markets. The main challenge is to achieve higher productivity of the capital employed in this sector by strengthening indigenous technological capabilities in all aspects of power engineering, including in the manufacture of power equipment, and the construction, operation, maintenance and repair of power stations.

Evolving technologies, utility incentives and alternative financing and cost recovery methods

During the 1950s and 1960s, the regulatory environment and the high average demand growth encouraged rapid technical change which was embodied in generating technologies of ever greater scale. Experience in the 1970s contradicted many of the assumptions of the 1950s and 1960s. This paper surveys technologies currently under development and indicates how they may be adopted under alternative financing and cost recovery methods in the entirely different world of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Emerging economic constraints on transborder data flows

The phenomena of transborder data flows have emerged from rapid technical changes in the area of computer communications. Attendant upon this, new economic opportunities are inducing institutional changes designed to modify the manner in which economic gains are to be partitioned. This has, in turn, led to government actions that go beyond conventional allocative and redistributive roles of governmental intervention. This paper discusses some of the welfare implications of ‘protectionism’ that have appeared on the international scene. By so doing we may begin to anticipate and perhaps circumvent the economic inefficiencies of barriers to trade involving data flows.

YOUTH CONSULTATIONS ON ALCOHOL AND DRUG PROBLEMS

A group of students, headteachers, youth workers, probation officers, health educators and doctors came together in 1979 with the aim of consulting young people about alcohol and drug problems in the community. The interest which brought about this initiative and the response to it are described briefly. There is undoubted demand and universal approval for the consultative approach. The richness and intensity of the response from the large number of young people consulted suggests their great desire for information and participation in problem-solving and prevention. It is suggested that processes of consulting and informing young people about social and personal problems have been lost in the distortions of cultural transmission in a period of rapid technical advances and social changes. The authors conclude that their empirical and innovative approach should be developed, studied and evaluated.

Development of competence in a world of rapid technical change

Solar thermal power is paving a path for the development of sustainable energy. In this work, solar energy is concentrated on a small area and this concentrated energy is further used for steam generation. The strategy is to use a solar collector of the shape of a parabola, hence called parabolic trough collector. The rays of the sun after striking through the surface of this collector, generally a highly reflective material, Zinc plated galvanized plain sheet with reflective silver RS-20 film covering the surface, will fall on the focus line which is a high thermal conductive material pipe, specifically copper tube in which heat transfer fluid is placed that gets heated due to concentrated heat. The use of this system can lead to direct steam generation. The further process remains the same where a turbine is rotated by this high pressure and temperature steam and a generator connected to it leads to power generation. This system will add to the increased efficiency of solar energy extraction with no use of the non-renewable source of energy that was being used for generating steam.

Agriculture and Natural Resource Adequacy

American Journal of Agricultural EconomicsVolume 64, Issue 5 p. 811-820 General Session Agriculture and Natural Resource Adequacy Emery N. Castle, Emery N. Castle president of Resources for the Future, Inc.Search for more papers by this author Emery N. Castle, Emery N. Castle president of Resources for the Future, Inc.Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 December 1982 https://doi.org/10.2307/1240740Citations: 7AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume64, Issue5December 1982Pages 811-820 RelatedInformation

A Microprocessor Revolution and the World Distribution of Income

This article shows that even if the world economy is able to withstand and surmount the present world crisis, the combination of market forces and rapid technical change that would be the result of a microprocessor revolution will give rise to large shift in the distribution of income within and between both rich and poor countries. Some developed and developing economies may be unable to join the move to new technologies. In a world governed by only economic forces, all countries, whether they choose to adopt new systems of production or not, will be affected. Indeed, whatever their degree of involvement, all countries are beginning to feel in varying degrees the chain reaction that reverberates through and between all sectors of their domestic and the world economies. To gain insights into interrelations between technological change and global markets, this article uses a special type of model-a general equilibrium model-that enables us to focus on exactly these variables.

Technical change in the commercial aircraft industry, 1925–1975

The American commercial aircraft industry has complied an extremely impressive record of performance in innovation and growth in output. This paper assesses the impact of government policy during a fifty-year period upon innovative performance and market structure in the commercial aircraft industry. In general, this apparent success of government policies in supporting rapid technical change in the industry reflects the impact of these policies upon both the supply of technological knowledge and the demand for innovative aircraft designs. The success of this policy structure has implications for technology policies in other industries.