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What does it take for a society to be able to innovate? The question is crucial today when an increasing share of world patents are taken out by countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, which have limited energy resources and cultures very different from those in the West. However, most previous studies of the beginnings of industrialization have focused on the resources and institutions of Britain alone. As a result, they have missed the lessons to be learned from casting the net more.

Did breakthroughs in core processes during the Industrial Revolution tend to generate further innovations in downstream technologies? Here a theoretical model examines the effect of a political shock on a non-innovating society in which there is high potential willingness to cooperate. The result is regional specialization in the innovation process by degree of cooperation. Tests with a zero-inflated Poisson specification indicate that 116 important innovations between 1700 and 1849 may be grouped into three categories: (1) General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) tended to be generated in large states with standardized languages following transition to pluralistic political systems; (2) GPTs in turn generated spillovers for their regions in technologies where cooperation was necessary to integrate distinct fields of expertise; (3) however, GPTs discouraged downstream innovation in their regions where such direct cooperation was not required.

Did breakthroughs in core processes during the Industrial Revolution tend to generate further innovations in downstream technologies? Here a theoretical model examines the effect of a political shock on a non-innovating society in which there is high potential willingness to cooperate. The result is regional specialization in the innovation process by degree of cooperation. Tests with a zero-inflated Poisson specification indicate that 116 important innovations between 1700 and 1849 may be grouped into three categories: (1) General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) tended to be generated in large states with standardized languages following transition to pluralistic political systems; (2) GPTs in turn generated spillovers for their regions in technologies where cooperation was necessary to integrate distinct fields of expertise; (3) however, GPTs discouraged downstream innovation in their regions where such direct cooperation was not required.

The rise & fall of states has traditionally been explained either by random factors specific to each state, or as the life cycle through which all states eventually proceed. Neither approach can account for systematic historical patterns, eg, the tendency toward smaller political units 400-1400 AD, & the tendency in the opposite direction since 1400. By applying a theory of agency to the question of the role & size of the state, a simple model is able to predict the directions of change in territorial boundaries & the tax share of income for eight major historical transformations in the scale economies of information processing & military control. Moreover, evidence is presented suggesting that innovation was responsible for initiating change in political & economic structures. 2 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 49 References. Adapted from the source document.

SUMMARYWhy did peacetime government shares of total spending double in a number of Western economies between 1910 and 1938? The widely separated dates for the introduction of universal manhood suffrage and the evidence of a rise in protection during the inter‐war period indicate that neither democracy nor globalization can explain this development. This paper reexamines two other explanations, namely, (1) a shift in the demand for public goods and (2) a war‐induced willingness to share with one's fellow citizens. By introducing into Schelling's (1978) Multi‐Person Dilemma a learning game whose payoffs change endogenously, we provide theoretical explanations for this transformation. We then test the resulting propositions with data on public spending as a share of GNP for the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and Denmark, from the 1870s to the 1930s. In each case, we find no unit root but a break in trend, a result shown to favor explanation (2) over (1).

In dem Beitrag wird untersucht, warum die Produktivität in der DDR hinter der der Bundesrepublik zurückblieb. Es wird festgestellt, dass die institutionellen Gegebenheiten in der DDR die Einführung neuer Informationstechnologien verhinderten und die ostdeutsche Wirtschaft deshalb ineffizient wurde. (IAB)