Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/32268
Year of Publication: 
2006
Series/Report no.: 
Arbeiten aus dem Osteuropa-Institut München No. 265
Publisher: 
Osteuropa-Institut München, München
Abstract: 
Several trade-based measures of product variety have recently been used implicitly to represent states of technology, promoting long-run growth. In this paper, we define the state of technology as the range of specialised production processes and propose the variety of capital goods available for production as a direct measure of technology. Within a simple growth framework, we derive a testable conditional technological convergence hypothesis on this measure. The hypothesis is tested with highly disaggregated trade data by economic categories, using tools from the income convergence literature. The results suggest that trade-based count measures of the variety of available capital goods indeed behave as if they were representing technology and that there is conditional technological convergence among our panel of mainly OECD and transition economies.
Subjects: 
Product variety
diffusion
adoption
technical change
JEL: 
F14
O33
ISBN: 
3938980095
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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