The Theory of Growth and Technology Transfer : Experience from the East Asian Economies

Abstract

Today, the East Asian economies are viewed as the role models for most of the LDCs and the formerly planned economies. Their rapid catching up with the DCs is achieved, to a great extent, with transferred technology. We discuss below the issues in modeling theoretically their experience. Specifically, we offer a theory which predicts a unimodal time profile for the growth rate as observed in Japan and Taiwan, and we identify the causal factors which may facilitate the "imitational component" for technical progress.