relative position. Alexander Gershenkron (1952) maintains the “advantage of rela-
tive backwardness.” There are potential advantages for countries that are technology
followers, like early post–World War II Japan, and South Korea and Taiwan,
in the last quarter of the 20th century. Although followership requires an early
emergence of indigenous technological capacity, it may not require deep levels of
knowledge.
From World War II to the 1980s, rapidly growing Japan and Germany were large
net importers of technology, whereas slow-growing Britain and the United States were
not, suggesting that part of the latters’ industrial problems is too little awareness of
others’ inventions and development (Franko 1983:24).
However, the catch-up process is self-limiting because as a follower catches up,
the possibility of making large leaps by acquiring best-practice technology becomes
smaller and smaller. The potential for rapid growth by a follower, such as Japan
and Germany, weakens as its technological level converges toward that of the leader,
the United States (Abramovitz 1986:387–389). As Japan has shifted to leadership
in numerous industrial sectors, it has had to orient its technological policies and
educational system toward original research at the technical frontier, which is more
expensive than followership. Indeed, as Chapter 3 argues, Japan had exhausted ben-
efits from post–World War II technological catch-up, learning by doing, and internal
and external economies of scale by the 1980s; Germany’s postwar “advantages from
backwardness” also dissipated about the same time. Moreover, the United States
`increased its relative gap vis-a-vis Germany and Japan in the 1990s by enjoying the
world’s fastest growth in TFP (although, as indicated later, not necessarily the fastest
growth in information technology TFP).