Search Results for « Technological change »

Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents.The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good.Because of the nonconvexity introduced by a nonrival good, price-taking competition cannot be supported, and instead, the equilibrium is one with monopolistic competition.The main conclusions are that the stock of human capital determines the rate of growth, that too little human capital is devoted to research in equilibrium, that integration into world markets will increase growth rates, and that having a large population is not sufficient to generate growth.

The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, adoption simplifies and mischaracterises what happens during processes of technological change. In all but the very simplest cases, it is likely to be inadequate to capture the complex reconfiguration of social and technical components of a technological practice or system. We review the insights of a large and expanding literature, from various disciplines, which has deepened understanding of technological change as an intricate and complex sociotechnical reconfiguration, situated in time and space. We explain the problems arising from the inappropriate use of adoption as a framing concept and propose an alternative conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating technological change. The new approach breaks down technology change programmes into four aspects: propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses. We begin to sketch out how this new framework could be operationalised.

In this paper we argue that an important source of the recent increase in outsourcing is the computer and information technology revolution, characterized by increased rates of technological change.Our model shows that an increase in the pace of technological change increases outsourcing because it allows firms to use services based on leading edge technologies without incurring the sunk costs of adopting these new technologies.In addition, firms using more IT-intensive technologies face lower outsourcing costs of IT-based services generating a positive correlation between the IT level of the user and its outsourcing share of IT-based services.This implication is verified in the data.

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time.We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home-and marketproduction more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation.We analyze how such technological change leads to unexpected relationships among income, food prices, and weight.Using individual-level data from 1976 to 1994, we then find that such technology-based reductions in food prices and job-related exercise have had significant impacts on weight across time and populations.In particular, we find that about forty percent of the recent growth in weight seems to be due to agricultural innovation that has lowered food prices, while sixty percent may be due to demand factors such as declining physical activity from technological changes in home and market production.