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Early Adoption of Technologies since 1750 till 2012
08 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, economic history, entrepreneurship Tags: 10-90 lag, international technology diffusion, technology diffusion, technology usage lags
Deigo Comin has been doing excellent work documenting both the length of 10-90 technology lags even for major technologies we now take for granted, and the contribution of these technology usage lags to international differences in living standards and post-war growth rates.
The East Asian Tigers all coincided with a catch-up in the range of technologies used with respect to industrialized countries. These development miracles all involved a substantial reduction of their technology adoption lags relative to (other) OECD countries
15 to 30 years is a common technology usage lag even within the United States for the 10-90 technology lag. The 10-90 lag is how long it takes between when 10% of industry is using a technology, and 90% of an industry is using that technology.
There is a plenty of research carried out about how important early adoption of technology is. I’ve recently skimmed a couple of researches on this topic. In my opinion there are two authors that made a better job than others. Their names are Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn.
They performed a cross-country analysis called Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT). This research dataset covers the diffusion of 104 technologies in 161 countries during the last 200 years. The data is available for download.
I just want to share with you the results of their report which could help better understand what’s happening in today’s world of innovations and entrepreneurship and what expect from future.
Finding # 1. “On average, countries adopted a new technology 45 years after its invention.”
Finding # 2. “Variation in adoption rates is larger than you might expect and accounts for 25% of differences…
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