IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/revpol/v31y2014i5p454-477.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

When the High Road Becomes the Low Road: The Limits of High-Technology Competition in Finland

Author

Listed:
  • Darius Ornston

Abstract

Globalization has generated increasing interest in technology-intensive industries as a way to sustain national economic competitiveness. High-technology growth is often conceptualized as a “high road” to prosperity, more amenable to private–public, industry–labor, and interfirm cooperation than tax, regulatory, or cost competitive strategies. While specialization in technology-intensive industries does deliver several benefits, this article uses Finland's successful transformation into a high-technology economy to highlight the significant economic and political risks associated with this strategy. Economically, movement into electronics exposed Finland to cost competition and disruptive technological innovations. Politically, high-technology competition weakened the solidaristic ties that characterized postwar capitalism and the coordinating capacities that underpinned economic growth. In short, high-technology growth exacerbated the problems it was supposed to solve. The article concludes by generalizing the argument to several non-Nordic states.

Suggested Citation

  • Darius Ornston, 2014. "When the High Road Becomes the Low Road: The Limits of High-Technology Competition in Finland," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 31(5), pages 454-477, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:revpol:v:31:y:2014:i:5:p:454-477
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ropr.12091
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bulfone, Fabio, 2020. "The political economy of industrial policy in the European Union," MPIfG Discussion Paper 20/12, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:revpol:v:31:y:2014:i:5:p:454-477. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ipsonea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.