After the miraculous economic growth known as the Beijing Consensus, China is now facing a slowdown. The attention has moved to the issue of the middle income trap. This book deals with this interesting issue in the context of China. It also discusses China's limitations and future prospects, especially after the rise of a new "cold war" between China and the US, namely the question of whether China would fall into another trap called the "Thucydides trap", or conflict with the existing hegemon as a rising power. In sum, this book plays around three key terms, namely, the Beijing Consensus, the Middle Income Trap, and the Thucydides trap, and applies a Schumpeterian approach to these concepts. It also conducts a comparative analysis that examines China from an "economic catch-up" perspective. An economic catch-up starts from learning and imitating a forerunner, but finishing the race successfully requires taking a different path along the road. This act is also known as leapfrogging, which implies a latecomer doing something different from, and often ahead of, a forerunner. Technological leapfrogging may lead to technological catch-up, which means reducing the technological gap, and then finally to economic catch-up in living standards (per capita income) and economic size (GDP: economic power). This linkage from technological leapfrogging and catch-up to economic catch-up corresponds exactly with a similar linkage from the Beijing Consensus to escaping (or not) the middle income and the Thucydides traps. One conclusion from this book is that China's successful rise as a global industrial power has been due to its strategy of technological leapfrogging, which has enabled China to move beyond the middle income trap and possibly the Thucydides trap, although at a slower speed.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

This book elaborates upon the dynamic changes to Korean firms and the economy from the perspective of catch-up theory. The central premise of the book is that a latecomer’s sustained catch-up is not possible by simply following the path of the forerunners but by creating a new path or ‘leapfrogging’. In this sense, the idea of catch-up distinguishes itself from traditional views that focus on the role of the market or the state in development.

Many developing countries still face difficulties initiating and sustaining economic development. Such difficulties have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an increasing divergence between rich and poor countries. One crucial question is whether to follow the trajectories of present-day rich countries or seek out different, new trajectories. Although this is a fundamental question, scholars offering mainstream prescriptions have not sufficiently explored it. Drawing on extensive empirical studies of firms and industries, Innovation and Development Detours for Latecomers proposes an effective alternative to prevailing development thinking. It presents a rich menu of development pathways, including a new role for Schumpeterian states whereby they do not follow the paths of technological development already taken by advanced countries. Rather, they can skip certain stages and even create their own detours thereby leapfrogging advanced countries in both manufacturing and service sectors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

One of the puzzles about why some countries have stronger economic growth than others revolves around the so-called 'middle-income trap', the situation in which a country that has grown strongly gets stuck at a certain level. In this book, Keun Lee explores the reasons why examples of successful catching-up are limited and in particular, why the Asian economies, including China, have managed to move, or are moving, beyond middle-income status but economic growth has stalled in some Latin American countries. This is one of the first studies to demonstrate using patent analysis that the secret lies in innovative systems at the firm, sector and country levels which promote investment in what the author calls 'short-cycle' technologies and thereby create a new path different from that of forerunning countries. With its comprehensive policy framework for development as well as useful quantitative methods, this is essential reading for academic researchers and practitioners.

A highly original book that provides policy solutions for development challenges, framing them with insightful and inventive allegories.

This book argues that Latin America must confront two main challenges: greater innovation to increase productivity, and greater inclusion to incorporate more of the population into the benefits of economic growth. These two tasks are interrelated, and both require greater institutional capacity to facilitate both innovation and inclusion. Most countries in Latin America are struggling to escape what economists label “the middle income trap.” While much if not all of the region has emerged from low income status, neither growth nor productivity has increased sufficiently to enable Latin America to narrow the gap separating it from the world’s most developed economies. Although income inequality has diminished across much of the region in recent years, social vulnerability remains widespread and institutional weaknesses continue to plague efforts to achieve equitable development. This volume identifies lessons that can be learned and adapted from experiences within the region and in East Asia, where the middle income trap has largely been avoided. This book is the result of a collaborative project undertaken by American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies (CLALS) and the Corporation for Latin American Studies (CIEPLAN) in Chile, with financial support from the Inter-American Development Bank’s Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness.

Until recently, economists studying economic development have tended to consider it as a universal process, or focused their attention on common aspects. This book originates from the growing recognition of significant sectoral differences in economic development and examines the catching-up process in five different economic sectors: pharmaceuticals, telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, software, and agro-food industries. Each of these sector studies explore the learning and catch-up processes in various developing countries, in order to identify both the common features, and those which differ significantly across sectors and nations. The authors pay particular attention to China, India, Brazil, Korea and Taiwan. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, this book will prove to be invaluable for academics and postgraduate students interested in economic and technological development, and evolutionary economics. Contributors include: J.O. Adeoti, S. Athreye, A.C. Castro, R. Diaz, S. Gu, S. Guennif, X.-X. Kong, K. Lee, Y. Lin, F. Malerba, S. Mani, Q. Mu, R.R. Nelson, J. Niosi, J. Orozco, S.V. Ramani, R. Rasiah, J. Song, T. Tschang

"The contributions forming the different chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at the Eight Uddevalla Symposium 2005 ... held at and hosted by the University West, Uddevalla, Sweden"--Pref.