Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy [Hardcover]

Gene M. Grossman (Author), Elhanan Helpman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1991

Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress; innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a by-product of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop an approach in which innovation is viewed as a deliberate outgrowth of investments in industrial research by forward looking, profit-seeking agents. They also devote attention to the place of international trade in the growth process, including the transmission of innovations from the industrial economies to the IDCs. Grossman and Helpman provide an overview of recent analyses of innovation and growth, expanding the available formal theory in a number of ways. They develop straightforward theoretical models that treat innovation as the outgrowth of costly investments in industrial competitive conditions in national and international product markets. Since firms in different countries race to bring out new products, growth processes are linked by international technological competition. An important aspect of Grossman and Helpman's study, is that they focus on the growth process of a country that operates in a global economy. They allow comparative advantage to be created endogenously in the industrial research laboratory but look at the dynamic determinants in the pattern of trade and the interactions between trade and growth. One chapter is devoted entirely to how economic integration affects a country's innovation and growth, while another studies the effects of national policies in an international environment. The final two chapters take up interaction between the processes of innovation in the industrialized North and imitation in the middle income South.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A pathbreaking contribution by two of the smartest economists at the frontier of trade theory today." Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Gene M. Grossman is Jacob Viner Professor of International Economics and Director of the International Economics Section at Princeton University. Elhanan Helpman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, the Archie Sherman Chair Professor of International Economic Relations in the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel-Aviv University, and a Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Mit Pr (December 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262071363
• ISBN-13: 978-0262071369
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,124,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a very useful synthesis of trade and growth theory, November 8, 2000

By 

m_noland "m_noland" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy (Paperback)

This volume is a very useful synthesis of trade and growth theory, pulling together a lot of related models and presenting them in a systematic manner with unified notation. One is struck at the end how much the results turn on traditional differences in factor usage intensities across industries, and as a consequence, how non-robust many the results are in a prescriptive sense.