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1st Charles Cooper annual memorial lecture

Date & Time:
Friday, 19th January, 2007
15h00

Venue:
Aula, Faculty of Economics & Business Administration, Maastricht University, Tongersestraat 53
6211 LM Maastricht
the Netherlands

More information: info@merit.unu.edu

   The Challenge of the Asian Drivers:
 From Industrial to Innovation Policy
 


 Professor Raphie Kaplinsky

 

Speaker: Professor Raphie Kaplinsky

Abstract:
This first Charles Cooper Memorial Public Lecture focuses on technological change and in particular on the entrepreneurial quest to generate and appropriate Schumpeterian rents at the country level. In the context of declining terms of trade, this has historically been reflected in a drive to industrialize. However, the growing global presence of the Asian Driver economies (notably China and India) and their impact on the terms of trade, challenges this commitment to industrialization. Sustainable income growth in the contemporary global economy increasingly arises from organizational innovation, including of global value chains, global production networks and industrial clusters. This requires a change in policy focal length, away from industrialization to a broadly conceived programme targeting embodied and organizational innovation across a range of sectors.

About the speaker:
Raphie Kaplinsky is a development economist, with research and operations experience since 1970 in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central Asia and many industrialized economies. He has made an important contribution to our understanding of the processes that drive growing global inequality and in developing appropriate policies to provide for different outcomes. This was the subject of his recent acclaimed book Globalization, Poverty and Inequality: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) and his recent article “Revisiting the Terms of Trade Revisited: What Difference does China Make?” (World Development 2006). At the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, where he was based for many years - and where he worked closely with Charles Cooper in the 70’s and 80’s -  Raphie Kaplinsky led the Global Value Chain Initiative that applied value-chain analysis to explain global production networks and their impact on the position of developing countries.  He also initiated the Asian Drivers research programme, one of the first systematic studies of the impact of the growth of China and India - not only on rich countries but on the poorer developing economies as well. He has been a consistently strong voice at diverse intergovernmental and international fora in emphasising the important role of international and national public policy in development. He is currently Professor of International Development at the Open University in the UK.

Related document:
Conference report

 
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