Innovation policy in Ireland: economic ideas and institutional diversity

Abstract

For academic economists, the questions ‘what are the sources of technological progress?’ and ‘to what extent can policy assist innovation?’ appear now to be increasingly almost co-extensive with the central question of economic science: ‘what determines the wealth of nations?’. To use the title of Joel Mokyr’s (1992) compelling and accessible historical survey, economists now seek to understand the ‘lever of riches’. This is, at least for mainstream macroeconomists, mainly a process of rediscovery, in that for most of the post-war period, they shared in, or perhaps more accurately, created, the same trance of short-run economic policy management which mesmerised policymakers. The macroeconomic research agenda has decisively turned, for fifteen years or more, towards bringing technological change and innovation within the ambit of economic explanation, in the hope of bringing to a long-running conversation, if not a new language, then a least a modern and rigorous idiom.