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The Economics of Knowledge

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The Knowledge Growth Regime

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Abstract

This chapter summarizes the main achievements of the economics of knowledge with special attention to the central role of the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its implications in terms of cumulability and extensibility. It recalls the early economics of knowledge. It explores the generation and exploitation of knowledge with the technology production function and the knowledge generation function. It elaborates the knowledge appropriability trade-off, analyzes the problems of the provision of funds to innovation, and highlights the relationships between knowledge externalities and total factor productivity stressing the new trends toward the capitalization of knowledge as a financial asset.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The rates of tax depreciation provide a reliable clue about the actual obsolescence of tangible capital goods. Although they exhibit a relevant variance, the heights of 30–40% for petrochemical and digital capital goods, to 25% for machinery, they confirm that the average duration of the economic life of tangible capital goods rarely exceeds 4 years.

  2. 2.

    The empirical evidence of Antonelli and Colombelli (2015) confirms the hypothesis that the knowledge generation function exhibits the typical traits of an o-ring technology.

  3. 3.

    Current attempts to take into account the role of intellectual capital do not seem to take into account the foundations of growth accounting (Ståhle et al. 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento Di Economia E Statistica Cognetti De Martiis, Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Cristiano Antonelli

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  1. Cristiano Antonelli
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Antonelli, C. (2019). The Economics of Knowledge. In: The Knowledge Growth Regime. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05508-0_2

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