This paper first develops a consistent time-series data on the exports of high technology products from essentially the developing countries. An analysis of the data shows that developing countries are increasingly becoming exporters of manufactured products as against primary products in the past. Second the world trade is increasingly becoming a trade in high tech products. What is more striking is the significant increase of the technology content of exports by developing countries: very nearly a quarter of the exports from developing countries is now in high tech products. Third, the share of developing countries in high tech exports have shown dramatic increases: it has increased from about 8 per cent in 1988 to about 23 per cent by 1997. But there is considerable concentration of it in a few countries. The paper then seeks to explain whether these developing countries are real exporters of high tech products or not. This is accomplished by a careful examination of the degree of product specialisation by both developed and developing countries, by examining their record with respect to patenting and finally by analysing certain indicators of high tech competitiveness. The paper concludes by presenting a case study of a leading high tech exporter from the developing world.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by United Nations University, Institute for New Technologies in its series Discussion Papers with number
1.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".