Re-examining International Technological-Knowledge Diffusion

In the standard models of North-South technological-knowledge diffusion, the larger the initial technological-knowledge gap between countries, the greater the Southern catching up. However, this result does not adjust well to Southern reality as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the disparity between the theoretical outcome and the empirical findings can be reduced by considering that: (i) the South can only imitate Northern technological knowledge when it is sufficiently close to the Northern frontier; (ii) the advantage of the South's moderate backwardness, together with its imitation capacity, is a mechanism of catching up with the North; and (iii) the Southern catching-up specification can be country specific. In particular, we show that the behavior of the South's relative level of employed human capital affects Southern imitation capacity and depends on the catching-up specifications.