Abstract
According to conventional economic theory, countries tend to converge in economic and technological terms towards the leader. More recently, empirical approaches by economic historians (Abramovitz, Landes, Madison, Reinert) have found that while some countries are catching up, others are falling increasingly behind. Several theories compete to explain the precise mechanisms that explain how technological diffusion takes place. The paper reviews them and draws testable hypotheses for the study of international biotechnology diffusion. Biotechnologies are one of the leading sets of technologies developed in the late 20th century. They encompass applications in agriculture, chemicals, environment and pharmaceuticals. The United States has led the way in both scientific and industrial development of biotechnologies and these have quickly spread to Canada, Japan and Western Europe. Are the main developing countries adopting biotechnology? A study of the adoption of human health biotechnology in eight developing countries in Asia (China, India, Korea, and Singapore) and Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) was conducted, based on the analysis of in situ interviews, patents and scientific publication. The study shows a marked process of adoption and learning in science: each of the above-mentioned developing countries is increasing its share of world publication between 1996 and 2008. However, their share of biotechnology patents for the same period has barely increased. There are also regional differences in terms of sectoral concentration; Latin America, Argentina and Brazil are eager adopters of agricultural biotechnology and are moving up in the pharmaceutical records. Several Argentinean, Chinese, Indian, and South Korean pharmaceutical companies have been particularly active in the development of biogenerics.
Reprinted from Journal of Evolutionary Economics 22(4), 767-783 , Springer (2012)
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Notes
- 1.
Science-Metrix used the Scopus database; through a computerized search 10,160 journals were analysed, and a list of keywords found in the title, keywords and abstract of articles. Un article co-authored by scientists from different countries counts as many times as there are co-authors. I.e. An article written by an Australian, a Chinese and a Japanese scholar, appears once for Australia, once for China, and once for Japan. Such article will represent one international collaboration for each country. The distribution was highly skewed: some 1207 of these journals had 80 % of the articles.
- 2.
Venture capital in China is still less developed than in industrial countries but it has been growing fast. The VC funds almost doubled from 2006 to 2007, an important share of funding came from abroad. As of 2007, the VC investment in China was US$ 3.25 Billion compared to US$30 billion in the U.S.. About 13 % of VC was invested in bio/health care in China, still less but not by so much than in the U.S. (China Biotech, 2009).
The government of all levels (state, province and cities) are among the principal sources of venture capital. In contrast to the U.S. VC, which brings not only money but also expertise, the lack of business expertise is reducing the effectiveness of government venture capital. In 2007 appeared the first local biotechnology fund (22 local biotech firms) and several multinational VC funds (BioVeda China, 2005).
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Niosi, J., Hanel, P., Reid, S. (2013). The International Diffusion of Biotechnology: the Arrival of Developing Countries. In: Pyka, A., Andersen, E. (eds) Long Term Economic Development. Economic Complexity and Evolution. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35125-9_10
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