Technology, Growth, and Development uniquely presents the complexities of technical and institutional change on the foundation of modern growth theory. The author shows how the rates and directions of technical change are induced by changes in competitive funding and institutional innovations in the modern research university and industrial laboratory. In turn, technical change itself becomes a powerful source of institutional change. Organized by the author in four parts, the first-Productivity and Economic Growth-gives specific reasons for the slowing of productivity growth in the...

Military and defense-related procurement has been an important source of technology development across a broad spectrum of industries that account for an important share of United States industrial production. In this book, the author focuses on six general-purpose technologies: interchangeable parts and mass production; military and commercial aircraft; nuclear energy and electric power; computers and semiconductors; the INTERNET; and the space industries. In each of these industries, technology development would have occurred more slowly, and in some case much more slowly or not at all, in...

This book reviews and assesses the impact of economic forces on the rate and direction of technical change.

Today more than three quarters of a billion people go hungry in a world where food is plentiful. A distinguished scientist here sets out an agenda for addressing this situation. Initially published in 1997 in the United Kingdom, the book is now available in the first edition produced for the Western hemisphere. In it, the author has updated information to reflect current economic indicators. This volume includes a foreword written for the previous edition by Ismail Serageldin of the World Bank.The original Green Revolution produced new technologies for farmers, creating food abundance. A...

Agriculture, Environment, and Health offers a broad and challenging analysis of changes now under way at the global level in institutional design and policy reform that ultimately will promote sustainable growth in agricultural production.

This collection of essays by Ruttan and Hayami spans their long career in the economics of technical and institutional change. At both a theoretical and empirical level, their analysis of induced innovation provides a solid foundation for understanding how and why technologies and institutions evolve in response to factors that constrain them. Can Economic Growth Be Sustained? provides a sweeping explanation of this process.

As scholars, Ruttan and Hayami's abilities and experiences complemented each other. Together, they had great success in working across contexts to integrate...