Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Innovation and the Asian Economies
- 2 Japanese Production Networks in Asia: Extending the Status Quo
- 3 Crisis and Innovation in Japan: A New Future through Technoentrepreneurship?
- 4 Crisis, Reform, and National Innovation in South Korea
- 5 From National Champions to Global Partners: Crisis, Globalization, and the Korean Auto Industry
- 6 Crisis and Adaptation in Taiwan and South Korea: The Political Economy of Semiconductors
- 7 China in Search of a Workable Model: Technology Development in the New Millennium
- 8 Economic Crisis and Technological Trajectories: Hard Disk Drive Production in Southeast Asia
- 9 Continuity and Change in Asian Innovation
- Index
8 - Economic Crisis and Technological Trajectories: Hard Disk Drive Production in Southeast Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Innovation and the Asian Economies
- 2 Japanese Production Networks in Asia: Extending the Status Quo
- 3 Crisis and Innovation in Japan: A New Future through Technoentrepreneurship?
- 4 Crisis, Reform, and National Innovation in South Korea
- 5 From National Champions to Global Partners: Crisis, Globalization, and the Korean Auto Industry
- 6 Crisis and Adaptation in Taiwan and South Korea: The Political Economy of Semiconductors
- 7 China in Search of a Workable Model: Technology Development in the New Millennium
- 8 Economic Crisis and Technological Trajectories: Hard Disk Drive Production in Southeast Asia
- 9 Continuity and Change in Asian Innovation
- Index
Summary
Technology policies, and economic policies more generally, are means by which countries can maintain or increase their autonomy within the international political economy. Concretely, autonomy in this sense refers to a country's capacity to adapt to or insulate domestic industry from external shifts. An important component of this capacity for more advanced developing countries is the ability to sustain technological upgrading, independent of foreign control. This chapter explores three propositions. One is that, owing to increasingly international production structures, the range of growth-promoting technology strategies has narrowed for the developing countries of Southeast Asia over the past decade or so. The second is that the institutional and political challenges of pursuing indigenous technological development and industrial upgrading within the constraints of global production structures are significant. Finally, both policy strategies as well as institutional and political challenges surrounding industrial upgrading have been impacted by the region's recent financial crisis, albeit in different ways and to differing degrees.
Policy decisions made by political and economic elites have had an important influence on indigenous technological upgrading in Southeast Asia. The significance of such decisions is reflected in the ways in which the three countries explored in this chapter — Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand — differ with regard to indigenous technological capacities.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Crisis and Innovation in Asian Technology , pp. 187 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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