High Tech Competitiveness: Spotlight On Asia

Beginning in the late 1980’s the Technology Policy and Assessment Center TPAC at Georgia Tech has been measuring the capability of nations to compete in technologyenabled exports.The resulting High Tech Indicators HTI contribute to the U.S.National Science Foundation NSF Science & Engineering Indicators1 .Our focus has been on the rapidly industrializing countries we include a number of highly developed countries as benchmarks.In the early days, the inclusion of a number of Asian nations as potential high tech competitors to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD seemed somewhat whimsical.Obviously, the U.S., Japan, and the leading Western European countries were farremoved from the upandcoming Asian economies.That is no longer the case.In this report, we profile the emergence of the Asian nations as bonafide global competitors.To do so, we emphasize longitudinal comparisons from 1993 through 2005 using our traditional HTI measures for 10 Asian countries plus the U.S.as a benchmark, with selected comparisons to the full set of 33 HTI countries.We then offer a new perspective for 2005 based on our newly formulated statistical HTI measures.