Types Of Technical Progress Research Articles

Growth and distribution: a revised classical model

ABSTRACT This paper discusses distribution and the historical phases of capitalism. It assumes that technical progress and growth are taking place, and, given that, its question is on the functional distribution of income between labor and capital, having as reference classical theory of distribution and Marx’s falling tendency of the rate of profit. Based on the historical experience, it, first, inverts the model, making the rate of profit as the constant variable in the long run and the wage rate, as the residuum; second, it distinguishes three types of technical progress (capital-saving, neutral and capital-using) and applies it to the history of capitalism, having the UK and France as reference. Given these three types of technical progress, it distinguishes five phases of capitalist growth, where only the second is consistent with Marx prediction. In the final phase, corresponding to financier-rentier capitalism and neoliberalism, the profit rate recovered from the fall of the 1970s, while wages have been growing below the growth of productivity.

Market competition, green technology progress and comparative advantages in China

PurposeTechnical progress is an important technique within improving China’s comparative advantages, as new and renewable technologies will be beneficial for energy security. Productive technical progress and green technical innovation are necessary to improve working conditions and productivity of industries. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study technical progress in China under such harsh competitive circumstances, as well as types of technical progress that can be promoted, productive technical progress or green technology progress, and how technical progress will affect China’s competitive advantages.Design/methodology/approachThe authors perform a multi-index multi-factor constitutive model based on a sample of 468 Chinese industries, and divide the industries into four categories.FindingsThe results indicate that there is a “U”-shape relationship between green technology progress and comparative advantages and an inverted “U”-shape relationship between the intensity of market competition and comparative advantages.Research limitations/implicationsChina has crossed the inflection point of the “U”-shaped curve. This, coupled with the slowing of economic growth, demonstrates the need for advocating green technology in China to decrease the pollutant discharge. Establishing Chinese national brands within overseas markets and earning a profit through the downstream of production chain enhance China’s international competitiveness.Originality/valueOne of the most original findings of this paper points out that China is faced with a situation in which exports are severely decreased and domestic environment pollution is increased. Vigorous promotion of green technology progress, improvement of the quality and the technical content of exported products, the establishment of national brand within the overseas market, as well as enhancement of China’s international competitiveness, is needed.

Germany and Italy: From 'Economic Miracle' to Global Crisis (Problems and Factors of Growth)

In the last six decades, Germany went through essentially two main phases of economic development: an extraordinarily rapid growth in the 1950s, the so-called German “economic miracle”, and then a gradual deceleration of development which implies near zero growth rates in our days. According to the empirical results, in the earlier rapid economic development a great role was played by the increase in labour force and fixed capital, as well as the impact of post-war reconstruction. The causes of the later slowdown to a very significant extent lie with the exchange rate policy and in the fact that since the German reunification no growth-oriented economic policy has been implemented. The foreign-trade model expounded in the paper gives an explanation of manufacturing growth taking exchange rates and terms of trade into consideration. Another function concretises the latter’s role with respect to macroeconomic growth. Factors determining economic growth from the supply side are analysed not only globally, but also at the level of manufacturing industry, the pulling sector of modern economy. In this connection, the author describes and uses an endogenous growth model (general model) elaborated and verified by a worldwide econometric investigation on 131 countries that considers not only physical and human capital, but also time as the event space of creative economic activity. In that model, the main components of economic growth mechanism are the intensity functions mapping three fundamental types of technical progress from the initial state without physical capital to the information society of our days. In addition to the role of growth factors in a narrow sense, the model in point makes it possible to evaluate the economic impact of other causes acting outside the mechanism of technical progress.

Technical progress, market forms and unemployment

The purpose of the present paper is threefold. The first purpose is to emphasise the importance of the insights to be found in Sylos Labini’s work. The second purpose is to expand upon it by distinguishing between the different types of technical progress. Finally, the third purpose is to comment on Labini’s comparison of Ricardo and Keynes on the possibility of technological unemployment. Regarding his description of technological progress as “labour saving”, the author shows that a more comprehensive description would be more useful for his purposes.

Neutralizing tendency of wages to grow below productivity rate

The apparent stability on relative shares in revenue during the 2000s, or even the increase increase in wages share in Latin American countries, seems to be surprise in Kaldor’s opinion, or even mystery for Schumpeter, or well finally a to economic theory according to Robinson. Various theories trying to explain sharing of value added insist on investment relative size, saving importance, different types of technical progress (biased or not), amount of idle capacity, cost structure, intermediate products importance, higher markup rates searching by entrepreneurs and, consecutively, on distributive conflict. We will analyze main macroeconomic models - those of Kaldor, Robinson and Kalecki – in order to overtake that reproach to economic theory. JEL Classification: E12; D33; O1; O15; O54.

The Yugoslav Model and Serbia's Transitional Economy: Some Aspects of Development

Abstract The study deals with key questions of Serbia’s economic development, including the regularities of transforming self-managed socialism to a standard capitalist system. It is based on the concept of endogenous growth and the general theory of market transition. In the empirical part of investigation, the main directions of economic development and transition in Serbia are analysed. Crucial issues of economic policy are also considered with a particular emphasis on the latest phase of transition. Concerning the problems of economic efficiency, an attempt is made to quantify the various types of technical progress and determine their contribution to its overall rate. The macroeconomic role of external factors is quantitatively shown through a globalisation effect related to inflows of FDI. The author believes that the Serbian economy, despite all its problems and difficulties, in principle has the potential necessary for finding adequate answers to the challenges of ‘neo-transition’. Of these challenges, he regards as most serious Serbia’s ability to comply with the standards of accession to the European Union, which, among others, requires closer regional cooperation.

Induced Innovation Revisited

This paper studies the joint evolution of factor prices, factor shares and the type of technical progress. Its main aim is to give a microeconomic foundation to the Hypothesis of Induced Innovation of the earlier literature, which assumes that the type of progress at any moment of time is chosen so as to maximize the current rate of output growth. An important conclusion of the Hypothesis of Induced Innovation is that in the long run factor–augmenting technical progress takes the form of pure labour augmentation.

Technical Progress and Outputs under Variable Returns to Scale

This paper analyzes the implications of three types of technical progress on outputs in a variable returns-to-scale framework. It is shown that Hicks-ne utral technical improvement is ultra-biased in production regardless of the direction and severity of the returns to scale. The output eff ect of intensive-factor-saving technical progress is more ultra-biase d (relative to neutral progress) regardless of the industrial pattern of returns to scale. These results may break down if the system unde r variable returns to scale is unstable. Intensive-factor-using techn ical progress, however, may have any output effect. Copyright 1987 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Toward empirical applications of lie-group technical progress functions

While many empirical studies compute a ‘rate of technical progress’, to be distinguished from scale effects, in the analysis of output (or cost) growth over a period of time, there have been few attempts to model the rate of technical progress. What few attempts there have been are based on simple-minded types of technical progress, namely the factor augmenting types, which present severe problems for distinguishing scale- and technical progress-effects. Sato's (1980, 1981) application of Lie-group theory to economics has opened the empirical analysis of technical progress to new types of technical progress with a foundation in theory. The purposes of this paper are to provide a brief, but sufficient, survey of Lie-group theory, and then identify some new types of technical progress which are feasible for incorporation into standard models of production (or cost) and technical progress.

Shares and Growth under Factor-Augmenting Technical Change

IT IS WELL KNOWN that in a neoclassical growth model the Hicksian neutral technical progress by itself or in combination with Harrod neutral technical change (factor augmenting technical progress) is not in general consistent with the stable long-run growth equilibrium in the sense that under this type of technical progress there exists, in general, no balanced growth. This implies that technical progress of the Hicks neutral tpye is inconsistent with a golden age where capital, labor (measured in efficiency units) and output all grow at the same rate and the relative shares of capital and labor remain constant (see [51). However, estimates of technical progress in various countries seem to show that inventions are essentially either Hicks neutral or factor augmenting ([3], [4], [6]). One remedy frequently suggested to correct the apparent inconsistency is to postulate an underlying production function of the Cobb-Douglas form where factor shares are independent of technological bias (unitary elasticity of substitution). This paper, which deals with factor augmenting technical change in general, intends to show that there is a large family of production functions that behave asymptotically in the same way as the Cobb-Douglas function, although having a very different functional form, and, hence, would not be inconsistent. These production functions belong to the same class as the Cobb-Douglas function in the sense that they exhibit factor shares which are asymptotically independent of technological bias. 1. By factor augmenting technical change we mean that the production function-assumed as usual to be homogeneous of degree one-can be written

Quantity Augmenting Technical Progress and Two-Factor Production Functions

been explicitly incorporated into the literature on the theory of economic growth. Partly as a consequence, we had developed no way of estimating the effects of different types of technical progress on output and we hadn't the slightest notion of the relative importance of these factors historically. The approach to these problems to which attention is devoted in this paper will be called the approach. This approach retains the two-factor production function framework commonly used in earlier productivity studies and makes use of the assumption that improvements that are in physical equipment are capital augmenting; that is, improvements in the quality of capital can be treated as increases in the quantity of capital of a given quality. In what follows, the increased efficiency due to such improvements will be referred to as embodied technical progress, or embodied progress. One of the first (if not the first) of the quantity augmenting models, a CobbDouglas type, was developed by Professor