Suchergebnisse

How Nations Innovate compares how affluent capitalist economies differ in their patterns of technological innovation. Building on the 'varieties of capitalism' literature, this book goes beyond the traditional focus on 'radical versus incremental innovation' in existing scholarship, and takes the comparison of capitalism to an entirely new set of questions around technological innovation. For example, which type of capitalism engages in job-threatening innovation? Whose innovation widens income inequality? Whose innovation raises productivity? Which type of capitalism has more effective financial markets for innovation? Whose innovators emphasize 'control' rather than 'flexibility' during innovation? By addressing these questions, the author demonstrates that the way nations innovate often has deep, and sometimes counter-intuitive, implications for how they compare in many areas of socio-economic performance. For example, although venture capital is most active in Anglo-Saxon economies, it seems that venture-capital performance in stimulating innovation is also poorest in precisely these countries

Abstract
While indirect taxes can fall on both consumption and investment spending, there has been little discussion on how governments may tax these two types of expenditure differentially. This article shows that the choice between taxing consumption and investment spending has important distributive implications for left governments as the traditional defenders of redistribution. In particular, when left governments increase taxes on investment relative to consumption expenditure, the higher price of investment relative to consumption goods drives up the labor share of corporate income, lowers corporate saving and reduces corporate net lending. Because this labor share strategy of redistribution is likely to antagonize capital, left governments tend to pursue it more intensely when corporatism has declined. I test these arguments using data across 12–14 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from the 1970s to 2010.

This article examines the sociopolitical conditions for preventing market failure in public goods investment. Based on International Social Survey Program data for 17 advanced industrialized countries, the author compares economies with strong and weak institutions of interfirm coordination in how they encourage investment in skills and technological innovation and highlight the inefficiency of alternative investment strategies that bypass cooperation. With weak coordination, firms underinvest in skills and the labor market relies on academic education as an alternative, resulting in underutilization of human capital. Innovation intensifies skill demands and can reduce overeducation. However, without cooperation, firms also underinvest in research and development, and the economy relies on innovation from outside the firm, which reduces its effectiveness in alleviating overeducation. In countries with weak interfirm coordination, the economy suffers simultaneously from deficient skills, underused academic qualifications, and technological innovations with limited human capital benefits for the labor force. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright.]