From Emerging to Submerging Economies: New Policy Challenges for Research and Innovation

The Schumpeterian process of "creative destruction", associated with the emergence and diffusion of new radical, so-called "general purpose" technologies, has throughout history impacted wealth and income, jobs creation, jobs displacement, and the emergence and submergence of new hotspots of innovation. Emerging countries have benefited most from such a renewing of those societies' dynamics, leading them to higher levels of economic development and welfare. Doing so they have shown a remarkable capacity in moving upstream in the value chain, from outsourcing of manufacturing activities to autonomous process technology development, product development, design, and applied research. At the same time however, such Schumpeterian processes have now and then turned into exactly opposite processes of "destructive creation." Such processes seem to have become common among what could be called "submerging" economies: innovation only benefitting a few at the expense of many with as a result an opposite pattern of a long term reduction in overall welfare, productivity, and employment growth.