Authors: Kartik Akileswaran, Jeffrey Mason, Jonathan Mazumdar

Progress Studies (PS) has set out to understand the massive improvement in living standards in recent centuries and how scientific, technological, economic, and institutional factors have influenced that transformation. Naturally, the movement has focused on the places that have experienced these transformations most dramatically – today’s high-income countries.

But given the need for ever greater investment – financial and human capital – in pushing the knowledge frontier, developing countries with large and growing untapped talent pools will have an increasingly important role to play too. This is why more attention should be paid to catch-up growth in developing countries in the wider PS movement, because it has the potential to influence dynamics at the global frontier and indeed is already affecting the cutting edge of global technological progress.

Continued progress and growth in high-income countries largely requires advances at the global technological frontier, the border between what we know now and what we have yet to discover. In recent years, various researchers and commentators have argued that the rate of scientific advances at the frontier has slowed, that the number of new ideas per researcher appears to be declining substantially across a wide range of fields.^[1] A variety of explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. One is that the scientific and technological low-hanging fruit has already been picked^[2]–which in part explains why high-income countries became high income in the first place. Another is that this may naturally be a function of how industries mature over time and new ones emerge in their place, thereby opening up new fields with yet undiscovered low-hanging fruit.^[3] Still another highlights the role of misguided incentives in driving scientists to pursue incremental gains instead of risky scientific breakthroughs.^[4]

One’s mileage may vary with respect to each of these explanations. A common implication of these and other hypotheses, however, is that we need to increase the number of people engaged in research – whether in pure science or applied engineering, higher-education institutions, private R&D labs, or startups. Doing so can at least partially offset declining per-researcher productivity (due to diminishing returns), and ...

Developing countries