From Changing The Path Of The World's Manufacturing Center To A Technology Innovation Center

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world manufacturing centre and technological innovation centre have shifted their locations a number of times. The United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Japan have all once played or are still are playing the"dual centre"role. Although some scholars argue that world factory is not an equivalent concept to world manufacturing centre, we believe that on a narrow definition the connotation of world manufacturing centre and that of world factory are consistent.China has nowadays become a manufacturing centre of the world. However Chinese production is still focused on the labor-intensive manufacturing industries or the labor-intensive segments of the technology-intensive industries, therefore possessing a low-end position in global production value chain. Chinese manufacturers, by utilizing their comparative advantages in labor caiptal, gain very slim profit margin among the fierce global competition. With the"Lewisian turning point"approaching, China is in urgent need of entering more value-added positions and upgrading from low-end of value chain that involves mainly producing and processing activities to the high-end which is dominated by crucial technologies. China needs to make conscious efforts to transform from a world manufacturing centre to a world technological innovation centre and finally merge the two centers into one and achieve a dual status.My dissertation herein conducted in-depth research on the whole processes of transforming from a manufacturing centre to a technological innovation centre experienced by the four countries including the UK, Germany, the U.S and Japan, in attempts to discover the common rules lying in such transformation in a world-wide scenario. After analyzing in detail the reasons and factors that prohibited many emerging economies from growing to become a new-generation technological innovation centre, I presented in my dissertation an optimal technology advancing path hypothesis that suits the late developing countries, which features such three phases as"Technology importing– Digesting and re-innovating– Self-developing". The optimal path for late-developing countries to achieve technological advance is to import technology during the first phase, then gradually to transit into the second phase that is focused on digesting the imported technology and conducting re-innovating, and eventually to evolve into the third phase that is featured by self-development. By utilizing the DEA-Malmquist Index Measurement, I conducted a number of empirical tests on the data covering years from 1890 to 1992 for the U.S, the UK and Japan, and data of years from 1975 to 2005 for of the US, the UK, Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Brazil and Mexico, the results of which evidenced my optimal technology advancing path hypothesis of the late developing countries.Through empirical tests, my dissertation herein concluded that"digesting and re-innovating"should give impetus to China for its technology advance at the current stage and China should make full use of the late-developing advantages of technology to expedite local enterprises'technological improvement and enhance their innovation ability. During the transformation from the world manufacturing centre to the technological innovation centre, China should speed up the process of optimizing the technological innovation mechanism and nurture a regulatory environment that favors technological innovation. China should also keep track of the ecologicalization trend of technological innovation and grasp the opportunities that have been brought along by the technology paradigm reform. Furthermore, China should leverage the foreign researching capabilities and take advantage of abundant opportunities in the current globalized environment so that it would eventually achieve a dual status and become the world manufacturing centre and technological innovation centre simultaneously.