Technological Convergence

This paper empirically investigates whether the contribution of human capital to productivity growth depends on the composition of human capital and proximity to the technology frontier in a panel of 87 sample countries over the period 1970–2004. It tests the hypothesis that primary and secondary education is more suitable for imitation whereas tertiary education is more appropriate for innovation. The results show that the growth enhancing effects of higher education increase with proximity to the technology frontier only for high and medium income countries

"Until today, the concept of convergence is widely used as a buzzword for outlining the impact of digitization. Opposing the idea of convergence as a single solution, this workshop seeks to challenge this concept, bring together up-to-date research exploring the diversity of current developments in media and communications and draw attention to the inconsistencies in media convergence discourse. These concern changing values, practices, organisational settings and business models of cultural and creative industries and other institutions.

Against this background a set of key questions can be raised: What are the distinctions that are worth being looked at more closely in media and communication convergence research? In what way are services, technologies and texts being regrouped within the innovation process? How are tendencies of convergence (or de-convergence) expressed in the use of media? What are the implications of modularity and mass customization in the field of media and communications? What is the relationship between technological convergence and the organisational design? How do the users cope with the increased complexity that is characteristic of a converging (or de-converging) media landscape?"

Por convergencia de conocimiento nos referimos al proceso de fusión de campos de la investigación científica y el desarrollo tecnológico, que resultan en un espectro de innovaciones emergentes con implicaciones sobre la competitividad, la sustentabilidad, y las condiciones de desarrollo de la vida humana. Es un concepto en torno al cual se congregan concepciones de desarrollo socioeconómico futuro, basadas en el desarrollo tecnológico, dada la tendencia sinérgica de campos de investigación, fundamentada en la transversalidad de las tecnologías de la información.

The globalizing world needs global knowledge that is required to investigate global processes. This monograph is devoted to the analysis of such truly global processes. It considers the economic development of the world in the last 600 years and offers forecasts for the next fi ve decades and more. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosive growth of a gap in per capita incomes (and the level of development in general) between the West and the rest of the world that has become recently known as " the Great Divergence ". In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence continued until the early 1970s; then, in the late 1980s, some convergence between the First and Third World started to be observed. Though this convergence has been noticed already by a number of researchers, many economists still doubt its presence or importance. In this book we demonstrate that after the 1980s we deal with a global process of the same scale as the process of the Great Divergence and we propose to designate it as the " the Great Convergence ". Furthermore we show that the Great Convergence is a logical continuation of the Great Divergence, and that certain components of the Great Divergence process were already preparing the onset of the Great Convergence in the period of the former's peak. What is more, we suggest that the Great Divergence and Great Convergence constitute two phases of a single Global Modernization process being tightly intertwined with other dimensions of Global Modernization as well as with globalization in all its historical phases. We also provide some evidence in support of our forecast that the process of the Great Convergence will continue over the forthcoming decades and, thus, will be one of the main factors in our globalizing world. It has long been known that societies develop unevenly. In fact, we are dealing with a kind of law of uneven development of societies, which implies that from time to time the leaders of global development (as well as the ideas about the balance of forces in the world) change. At the same time, certain ideas about the world hierarchy (after they have been strengthening for quite some time) can become very strong stereotypes even among historians and economists who seemingly should have a deeper understanding of how quickly things may change. And it is rather symptomatic that the strongest belief in such stereotypes appear just before the reversal of the respective trends (that can turn rather unexpected indeed). This phenomenon , by the way, is one of the reasons of the abovementioned underestimation of the importance of the present-day convergence. Since the thirteenth century (especially after the famous book The Travels of Marco Polo had appeared) for several centuries the Europeans perceived the Orient to be fabulously rich in comparison with their own countries, and the quality of products manufactured by the Eastern masters seemed unattainable. But then, already in the eighteenth century (Gordon 1997 ; Alam 2006) such perceptions began to change rapidly. Now the Orient, by contrast, became synonymous with a sort of eternal stagnation and backwardness. In the nineteenth century, Europe (and the West in general) left Asia and North Africa (let alone Sub-Saharan Africa) far behind as regards their level of development in economic, military, scientifi c, educational, and many other spheres. Britain and other Western countries, to varying degrees of completeness, subjugated most Asian and African societies. The Western infl uence was crucial for the rest of the world and very noticeable in economic terms even in the distant periphery of the eastern states. The fact is that the increased industrial might of Europe turned Asian countries fi rst into markets for European manufactured goods and then ruined Asian artisans, and fi nally transformed " the Orient " into a place for the application of European capital and a source of cheap labor. This very wide socioeconomic gap (whose emergence was much later called " the Great Divergence ") between Europe and Asia became a fact that did not require proof; it was so evident that there was an idea that this superiority was something perfectly natural and permanent, in other words, " a simple affair " (Goldstone 2013 : 54). One could observe the strengthening of the idea (that emerged in the eighteenth century) of the stagnant Orient that supposedly had never developed, of the Orient which had constant primordial essential features, including " its tendency to despo-tism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness " (Said 1979 : 205). The West was supposed to be so different from the East that they had little in common. Finally, such a view was crystallized in the poetic words of Rudyard Kipling " East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet " (Kipling 1919 : 3).