scholarly journals Political Entrepreneurialism: Reflections of a Civil Servant on the Role of Political Institutions in Technology Innovation and Diffusion in Kenya

Author(s):  
Elijah Bitange Ndemo
Econometrica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Buera ◽  
Ezra Oberfield

We provide a tractable, quantitatively‐oriented theory of innovation and technology diffusion to explore the role of international trade in the process of development. We model innovation and diffusion as a process involving the combination of new ideas with insights from other industries or countries. We provide conditions under which each country's equilibrium frontier of knowledge converges to a Fréchet distribution, and derive a system of differential equations describing the evolution of the scale parameters of these distributions, that is, countries' stocks of knowledge. The model remains tractable with many asymmetric countries and generates a rich set of predictions about how the level and composition of trade affect countries' frontiers of knowledge. We use the framework to quantify the contribution of bilateral trade costs to long‐run changes in TFP and individual post‐war growth miracles. For our preferred calibration, we find that both gains from trade and the fraction of variation of TFP growth accounted for by changes in trade more than double relative to a model without diffusion.


Author(s):  
Ada Scupola

This study investigates the role of government in the adoption and diffusion of e-commerce in small and medium size enterprises. Institutional involvement, and especially the role of government, has historically been determinant in the adoption and diffusion of technological innovations. King, Gurbaxani, Kraemer, McFarlan, Raman, and Yap’s (1994) framework of institutional factors in information technology innovation is used to analyze what is actually done and what SMEs would like to be done regarding government intervention to foster the adoption and diffusion of e-commerce. The findings show that the government could mostly influence adoption and diffusion through knowledge deployment, subsidies, and mobilization and that a convergence between companies’ wishes and government initiatives is starting taking place.


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