One of the striking features of our society is the incessant urge for the creation, adoption and diffusion of innovations.

Modern growth theory acknowledges that a country's economic prosperity depends in large part on its capacity for technological innovation. Empirical evidence, however, supports the view that not all sectors are equally innovative. As a result, it seems desirable from a public policy perspective to identify and promote sectors displaying both a high innovation rate and, in an increasingly competitive international economy, a high degree of international competitiveness. It is frequently argued that the high-tech industry sectors, in contrast to low-tech sectors, satisfy both conditions, with the clear implication that public policy should be directed to enhancing the performance of high-tech sectors. This approach raises at least two important issues. The first is whether such classifications can be meaningfully constructed given both the intractability of the concepts involved and the difficulties in data collection. A second issue is the basic assumption that policy emphasis should be placed on technology-intensive industries because they have a greater impact on growth. In this paper, we argue that while it may be possible to construct indices of technological intensity that are useful for some purposes, the ones that are currently proposed do not, in fact, address questions of economic growth and firm performance very well. In part, this is a reflection of the technicalities involved in formulating and operationalising the indices, but it also reflects problems in the underlying premise, namely technology-intensive sectors are more growth-inducing than low-tech sectors. We call, therefore, for the adoption of a more sophisticated and detailed approach that would provide a sensible classification of industries and new policy insights.High-TECH Low-TECH Industries, Intensity, Innovation, Economic Growth, Policy Implications,

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This paper is an attempt to tease out a typology of economic sectors based on a systems approach to innovation and economic growth that may be useful for policy analysis. The typology explored here revolves around novel products rather than ethereal knowledge-producing entities. This insight goes back to Allyn Young (1928) and Joseph Schumpeter (1934) who argued that the introduction of new goods was the engine of economic growth. More precisely, our typology of sectors focuses on novel products which are efficiency-enhancing within and between sectors through the market mechanism. The scheme revolves around the relationship between 'Enabling' and 'Recipient' sectors (which gives the typology its name: ER), and offers a lens for viewing and interpreting a substantive part of the mechanics of modern economic growth. The last part of the paper briefly discusses a few immediate policy implications, although it has the potential for greater use and value in this regard.Innovation, Economic Growth, Enabling Linkages Approach, Knowledge-based Economies, Novel Products, Efficiency-enhancing Innovations,

Scientific research on the banking crisis 2007-08 has answered many important questions according to generally accepted methodological standards. However, there remains at least one outstanding question that has not been answered with methodological accuracy: What caused the severe USA banking crisis 2007-08? To address this question the paper uses a counterfactual definition of 'cause,' distinguishes between separable and non-separable causes, and employs a well-posed methodology for the causation analysis of singular events. In addition, first causes and preponderant causes are distinguished. The main result of this paper is that the preponderant causes of the banking crisis 2007-08 were securitization and ignorance.