Climbing the Technology Ladder Too Fast? New Evidence on Comparative Productivity Performance in Asian Manufacturing

Global Production Networking and Technological Change in East Asia

“…Korea and Taiwan (China) still lag behind the United States in productivity. This is so even when comparing the productivity level of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s to that of Korea and Taiwan (China) in the 1990s, when their capital-labor ratios were comparable to that of the United States (Timmer 2002).…”

On the capability of SMEs to innovate: the cable and wire manufacturing subsector in Nigeria

“…The literature in the area of sustainable competitive advantage leads to the conclusions that the only thing that endows a competitive edge on an organisation or a nation is what it knows, how it uses what it knows and how fast it can know something new (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994;Prusak, 1996); and that the cause of the competitive gap between nations and organisations is knowledge (Prusak, 1997). Hence, with or without technology transfer, late industrialisers -like Nigeria -do not automatically benefit from the increasing global pool of technologies (Timmer, 1999). This is because the effective use of technology borders more on innovation and learning than on sourcing and acquisition .…”