Technological knowledge progress: Were famous laws almost correct in developing and emerging economies?

Abstract

Do the famous laws of the motion of technological progress like the Moore’s Law, Wright’s Law, Goddard’s Law, and their derivatives explain the technological knowledge progress of developing and emerging economies? The aim of this paper is to investigate that question. For that purpose, we rationalize an existing framework (Nagy et al. 2013) and employ it on a panel data set of 66 developing and emerging market economies over the 1995–2017 period. Empirical evidence is mixed. Some of the results confirm a positive relationship between technological knowledge progress and the progress of time. Other instances indicate that the slow rate of learning delays the doubling time by 18 years. Yet other results predict that this group of countries will double its rate of progress in 4–5 years. The explanatory power varies across the laws, with most laws suggesting acceptance of the hypotheses that the included variables affect the technological knowledge progress while others recommending that we “do not accept” the hypothesis that in-situ scale and hence cumulative GDP per capita explain the technological knowledge progress of these countries. Practical policy implications, which this group of countries can use to assess and address constraints to the technological knowledge progress, are also discussed.