文档介绍：Technological Diffusion and Investment Behaviour:
The Case of the Textile Industry
By
Cristiano Antoneili, Pascal Petit and Gabriel Tahar
C o n t e n t s: I. Introduction. - II. Technological Changes in the Textile Industry. -
III. A Model of Diffusion within a Macro-Economic Environment. - IV. Estimating the
Determinants of the Probability to Modernize. - V. Diffusion Patterns and Moderniza-
tion Behaviour.
I. Introduction
he diffusion of technological innovation incorporated in new capital
goods is the result of investment decisions which are influenced by two
T classes of factors: the characteristics of the innovation and the macro-
economic environment in which the adopters operate. Our aim in this paper is
to explain the role played by these factors in the adoption process at industry
level.
The macro-economic environment, in which firms operate, refers to such
factors as demand trends, relative production costs and petitive-
ness.
Technological factors refer, on the one hand, to the capacities of the new
machines (or their expected profitability) and, on the other hand, to the
availability of information and of the know-how to which the users must have
access. Stickiness of information and rigidity of learning processes generate
asymmetries between firms, bine with structural differences to
determine adoption and diffusion processes.
The international diffusion of shuttleless looms in the cotton weaving
industry in the late seventies and early eighties seems to provide evidence of the
joint effect played in their adoption by these two classes of factors, ., the
technological and macro-economic context of investment. The cotton weaving
industry, in fact, has been faced by dramatic changes in the distribution of
market shares, with the major decline of old industrialized countries and the
Remark: A preliminaryversion of this paper was presented at the meetingof the International
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