INTRODUCTION AND PRELIMINARIES

1.1 A Nontechnical Overview

Economies rely on a rich set of different inputs to produce goods and services. The composition of the pool of productive resources varies dramatically across countries. Some countries have a lot of workers with little education and few highly educated workers, while others have an abundance of workers with many years of schooling. Some countries have a copious supply of natural resources, relative to their stock of productive machinery and structures, while others are resource-poor but have plenty of equipment. Some countries have a lot of people and little capital; others have high capital-labor ratios.

Do these big differences in the composition of the bundle of factors of production lead to correspondingly large differences in the way productive activities are organized? Do productive units in a country tailor their mode of production, choice of technology, and management practices to the particular patterns of scarcity and abundance of inputs in their country? And if so, how? Do they choose production methods which make the most of the abundant factors — giving up, so to speak, on those that are relatively limited in their countries? Or do they rather focus on maximizing the contribution of the inputs in limited supply, to make up for their scarcity?

Similar observations, leading to similar questions, can be made for a given country over time. In the space of years and decades, the relative supply of skills, equipment and structure, natural resources, and even workers belonging to different demographic groups can change substantially. Do modes of production change and adapt in response to these changes? If so, does the adaptation compound the changes, by increasing the reliance of production units on the inputs that are becoming more abundant; or does it lean against the wind, by strengthening the ability to contribute to output of the factors of production that are becoming relatively scarce?

This book reports on my attempts to provide some answers to these questions. It shows that the mode of production — or the "production technology" in the words I use throughout the book — does vary systematically across countries, depending on their endowments of different factors of production. The production technology also changes over time, as factor supplies change. As to whether this adaptation favors the abundant or the scarce inputs, the answer turns out to be "it depends." When the factors becoming scarce are not that different, in terms of the role they play in the production process, from those becoming abundant, the production technology adapts to maximize the impact of the abundant factors. On the other hand, when the scarce factors are special and are difficult to replace using the abundant factors, the production technology mutates to bolster the contribution of the scarce inputs.

Admittedly, none of the above sounds particularly surprising. What is perhaps more surprising is that these patterns of technology adaptation are completely ignored by the vast majority of economists' thinking on how the organization of production varies across countries and (to a slightly lesser extent) over time. The dominant view, instead, is that some countries just have "better" technology than others, regardless of differences in factor endowment. Therefore, regardless of factor endowments, countries with "poor" technology should strive to copy as best they can the modes of organization they observe in countries with "good" technology. Similarly, over time technology mostly just gets "better," lifting the productivity of all factors equally. This pervasive, and rather boring, view of technology is incompatible with the evidence presented in this book: technology differences over space and time are much more interesting than most economists make them out to be!

1.2 A Slightly More Technical Overview

Economists characterize the relationship between a country's productive resources and its GDP by means of the aggregate production function. The aggregate production function can be used to answer two types of questions: (i) If country A has x% more of a given input (say, labor) than country B, by how much will country A's GDP exceed country B's (everything else being constant)? (ii) If country A experiences an x% increase in a given input between years t and t + 1, by how much will its GDP increase between the two years?

In empirical applications, economists have long noticed that production functions are not stable. Namely, the mapping from inputs onto outputs changes both across countries and over time. It is customary to refer to this instability as technology differences (across countries) and technical change (over time).

A long tradition of studies attempt to quantify the pace of technical change. This endeavor is usually refereed to as growth accounting. Growth-accounting exercises usually find technical change to be very important in driving changes in GDP over time. There is also a more recent, but now well-established, strand on quantifying the magnitude of technology differences across countries. These development accounting studies tend to find that technology differences are very important in determining differences in GDP. Both these sets of findings have profoundly influenced the way economists think about economic performance in the long run.

While these traditions have been effective at quantifying the extent of technology differences and technical change, they have arguably been less successful at characterizing their nature. In the vast majority of cross-country empirical applications technology is assumed to be factor neutral. Roughly speaking (and I will of course be more precise below) factor neutrality implies that if the efficiency with which a country uses one input is x% higher than the same input's efficiency in another, then the efficiency of all other inputs is also x% higher. Discussions of growth-accounting exercises are sometimes more nuanced and more aware of the possibility of technical change that is not factor neutral. Still, the methodology delivers a single quantitative measure of the pace of technical change, and is unsuited to characterize its nature. For this reason, growth-accounting results are still almost universally interpreted as if technical change was factor neutral.

This factor-neutral representation of technology is incompatible with various facts about factor...