Innovation policy in Ireland: economic ideas and institutional diversity
Kane, Aidan
For academic economists, the questions `what are the sources of technological
progress?? and `to what extent can policy assist innovation?? appear now to be
increasingly almost co-extensive with the central question of economic science:
`what determines the wealth of nations??. To use the title of Joel Mokyr?s (1992)
compelling and accessible historical survey, economists now seek to understand the
`lever of riches?. This is, at least for mainstream macroeconomists, mainly a process
of rediscovery, in that for most of the post-war period, they shared in, or perhaps
more accurately, created, the same trance of short-run economic policy management
which mesmerised policymakers. The macroeconomic research agenda has
decisively turned, for fifteen years or more, towards bringing technological change
and innovation within the ambit of economic explanation, in the hope of bringing to
a long-running conversation, if not a new language, then a least a modern and
rigorous idiom.
Read before the Society, 25 March 1999
This lecture is delivered under the auspices of the Barrington Trust (founded by the bequest of John Barrington, Esq.) with the collaboration of the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland.
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