User industry and accumulation of technological capabilities of producers-Finnings from the Korean machine tool industry

This study reveals that the user industry has a limited role as a source of technological capability in the case of the machine tools in Korea where the user industry is relatively mope advanced than other capital goods industry. The study examined the sources of technological capability in terms of migration of workforce and flow of product design information. Although the capital goods sector is generally regarded as being the sector where the user producer interaction is important the user industry failed to be the seed-bed of technological capability to develop machines. This study argues that this finding could have implications to the specificity of capital goods in a developing country.