Modern Catch Up With The System Of Innovation: Historical Investigation And The Theoretical Analysis

To catch-up with and surpass the first comers in the modernization process has been a major topic for all latecomers since the Industrial Revolution in the Great Britain. There have been a couple of successful examples such as the United State of America, Germany and others who caught-up with and surpassed the Great Britain, followed by Japan as the great success in this endeaver. But the majority of developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America failed to accomplish the goal even though they tried arduously during the past more than two hundred years. Overall, there have been fewer successes and more failures. It is necessary to explore the causes of successes and failures of those latecomer in the world and to learn their experiences especially when China is the process of industrialization, facing the challenge posed by the Knowledge Economy.Comparative studies of world economic history illustrate that institutional innovation is the most important factor to lead such late comers as USA, Germany and Japan to have caught up with and surpassed the Great Britain in the past centuries. In Eastern Asia, many countries under the influence of Japan's success in modernization since the Meiji Restoration era have followed the Japanese model of learning from imitating, amending, adjusting and innovating. It has been the major cause of many latecomers to actively bring transnational institutional innovations into full play to succeed in executing "catching-up with and surpassing" strategy and maintain rapid economic developmental performance. However, fewer researchers paid sufficient attention to the development of institutions. The major cause of the lack of full attention is that the importance of technological innovations is easier to be recognized than that of institutional innovations.Douglas North and other new institutional economists have successfully applied case study to analyze the institutional innovation process in the Great Britain, the Netherlands and USA and other western countries. They discussed less institutional innovations in non-western countries. There has been a great deal of literature found in academic circle about the implementation background, process and evaluation of these modernization strategies emerging after the Second World War. However, there has been a lack of generalization and summation and theoretical analysis of the modernization practices and theories implemented by major latecomers from the perspective of institutional innovations. The catch-up practices and strategies carried out by major latecomers have arisen as the outset of the British Industrial Revolution triggered the history of late comers to catch up with and surpass the developed countries. In order to understand how different cultural factors have effected different national institutional innovations and economic developments and, in particular to understand how North's theory is able to explain the institutional reforms and innovations in latecomers, this dissertation plans to explore the historical background of each institutional innovator, with the application of Marxist theories in analyzing and explaining the institutional principles of economics of the institutional formation and development in major latecomers under the different cultural background. The research focus extends from contemporary time into the historical process of those latecomers in catching-up with and surpassing the Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. It examines how different interest groups used games to lead different process and to different results in the implementation process of the catch-up with and surpassing strategies in those latecomers under different or similar cultural settings. It aims at finding out the key institutional causes of the successes and failures behind the evolution process and providing institutional analysis of the catch-up with and surpass strategies and practices in those latecomers.Since institutional innovations have different features from technological innovations, such as no...