Re: Systems of innovation

["Charles Jannuzi" <jannuzi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I've not seen the paper (and I'd really like to ... ), but I'd argue the
> US has exhibited many signs of an almost mercantilist corporatist policy
> approach to optimising intial advantage in IT - pushing TRIPs into the
> Uruguay Round, allowing anti-competitive mergers and such to ensure
> world-beating economies of scope and scale, pressuring the rest of the
> world into abandoning public telecommunications backbones - in fact -
> policy timing, from the AT&T transformation, to fighting off Japanese
> HDTV standards, to the shift of the public/private internet debate in
> the early nineties, to letting the money-rich but opportunity-poor
> BabyBells off the leash in '96, to allowing media monoliths to
> consolidate across media in '02 - well, it all looks like a technology
> policy of sorts - perhaps at a structural (diffusion and control) rather
> than technical (invention and innovation) level (the DoD drove a lot of
> the latter before the end of the space race and Vietnam War occasioned a
> need for civvie market opportunities, in the context of the post '73 dip
> in national competitiveness and national accounts all 'round), but
> arguably a technology policy nevertheless.
>
> Or not?
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.

Start with the 'bilateral' trade negotiations Reagan II, Bush, and Clinton
pursued against Japan, and you will begin to understand the full extent of
US 'corporatist mercantilism'. The next arm of it would appear to be to push
, if not through a 'democratized' WTO considered too unwieldy, through
bilateral efforts at liberalization of 'global, integrated, networked
services', with unregulated capital being the prime mover. Japan has already
conceded (and in fact been on board since 1989, though the concept was still
evolving then and didn't have the possibilities it does now--at that time it
was Japan supporting the US on the liberalization of services).

Check out how the US's economic plan 2002 explicitly links this
liberalization with an emphasis on global and bilateral agreements and the
alleviation of debt in the developing world (it's a breathtaking
synthesis!).

Charles Jannuzi