Jesus Felipe, Neil Foster McGregor, Önder Nomaler and myself just published a book entitled “Innovation and Structural Transformation in Asia”. It is a short volume that highlights some recent economic trends in the Asian global regions. The main source of the book is a database that we created that documents structural change, growth, technological change…

Oxford University Press just published the book “New Perspectives on Structural Change”, which was edited by Neil Foster-McGregor, Ludo Alcorta, Eddy Szirmai and myself. We worked on this book for several years, with a large team of authors, who are all top scholars in the field. New Perspectives on Structural Change is a comprehensive edited…

Can we think about economic growth without technology developing further? Perhaps we can, if the robots can take over… Önder Nomaler and I develop a model that was published in Economics of Innovation and New Technology, in which we show how this may work. In short: instead of technology making work ever-more productive, it could…

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate just published our evaluation report on the R&D tax credit policy WBSO, for the period 2011-2017. The evaluation was done in a collaboration between Dialogic, APE and UNU-MERIT. I worked on the econometric part of the evaluation, together with the people at APE. We found that the…

Those of you following the literature on the economic effects of R&D may have seen a paper by Van Elk et al. on the economic effects of investment in public R&D. Those who really follow that literature well may have seen both the working paper version, and the officially published one, and have noticed a…

One important topic in my work is the analysis of patent citation networks. These networks are kind of special, because they are a-cyclical and directed (contrary to most other networks that economists analyze, which often contain cycles and are non-directed). This work started with a publication in Advances in Complex Systems, dealing with fuel cells.…

The topic of growth rate differentials between countries has been a main theme in my work from the very beginning. It was the main topic of my PhD thesis of 1992. Chapter 6 of that thesis contains my model of catching up and falling behind (see picture below), which was also published in 1991 in…