Technological congruence and the economic complexity of technological change

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2016, vol. 38, issue C, 15-24

Abstract: Technological congruence is an emergent system property defined by the matching between the relative size of outputs’ elasticity with the relative abundance and cost of inputs in local factor markets. With given total costs, output is larger the larger is the output elasticity of the cheapest input. Technological congruence is a powerful tool that helps grasping the economic complexity of technological change with respect to the determinants of the direction of technological change and its effects in terms of growth accounting and specialization, both at the firm and the system level. Its appreciation stems directly from the advances of the economics of innovation in understanding the endogenous determinants of the introduction and diffusion of directed technological changes. Technological congruence is most relevant to influence the actual levels of total factor productivity of new technologies and – consequently – to shape the competitive advance of firms and countries.

Keywords: Factor shares; Directed technological change; Total factor productivity; Emergent system property (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X15000661
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:38:y:2016:i:c:p:15-24

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2015.11.008

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().