Technology and innovation: An introduction

Abstract

The fields of trade, growth and innovation have all increased in importance within the economics literature over the 1980s and 1990s, with one of the key developments being the renewed attempts to integrate the role of technical change into the analysis of trade and economic growth. For too long technology received scant attention from economists; although several works studied its impact on variables such as growth, productivity, employment and competitiveness, much less attention was devoted to understanding the sources and determinants of technological change itself. Hence Joan Robinson's remark that economists still treated technology as if it were provided by God and the engineers. This Special Issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics contains fresh contributions on the economics of trade, growth and innovation, and in particular on the investigation of technology as a driving force for economic growth and international competitiveness. / 1995 Academic Press Limited.