Technology and Development in the Third Industrial Revolution
C. Cooper, R. Kaplinsky (editors)By the mid-1970s it was becoming clear that traditional Keynesian demandmanagement
could no longer cope with growing imbalances in the global
economy or revitalise the slowing engine of economic growth. In place of
demand management, monetarism became increasingly fashionable, especially in
the political realm, emphasizing the efficiency of markets in resource-allocation
and highlighting rent-seeking behaviour and other forms of ‘state failure’. Its
growing influence on policy led to concerted attempts to roll back the state,
initially in the rich countries and subsequently in the Third World.
An alternative response to the declining attractiveness of Keynesian theory
was provided by the neo-Schumpeterian structural analyists. Focusing on the
supply-side of economic activity, they emphasized the central role played by
technological change in economic growth. Some of these neo-Schumpeterians—
notably Chris Freeman and his colleagues at the University of Sussex—added to
these analyses a conception of radical technological discontinuities. They argued
that since the mid-eighteenth century a series of historically distinct ‘heartland
technologies’ had evolved, and each was associated with epochs (‘long waves’)
of economic growth. In this view, not only technological change, but the
revolutionary character of certain technological changes, played central roles in
the growth process