How Nations Learn

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

What are the prospects for successful learning and catch-up for nations in the twenty-first century? Why have some nations succeeded while others failed? The World Bank states that out of over one hundred middle-income economies in 1960, only thirteen became high income by 2008. How Nations Learn: Technological Learning, Industrial Policy, and Catch-up examines how nations learn by reviewing key structural and contingent factors that contribute to dynamic learning and catch-up. Rejecting both the 'one-size-fits-all' approach and the agnosticism that all nations are unique and different, it uses historical as well as firm-, industry-, and country-level evidence and experiences to identify the sources and drivers of successful learning and catch-up and the lessons for late-latecomer countries.

Authored by eminent scholars, the volume aims to generate interest and debate among policy makers, practitioners, and researchers on the complexity of learning and catch-up. It explores technological learning at the firm level, policy learning by the state, and the cumulative and multifaceted nature of the learning process, which encompasses learning by doing, by experiment, emulation, innovation, and leapfrogging.