Iets minder bekend bij het grote publiek is Bengt-Ake Lundvall. De man achter de theorien van de Nationale Innovatie Systemen en het belang daarin van instituties. Ik volsta met een aantal passages die ik af en toe citeer of nog eens denk te citeren en die verder voor zichzelf spreken:
"In his influential analysis, Katzenstein (1985) links the size of the national economy with an inclination towards a policy of free trade and openness, and a strong affinity towards corporatism, resulting from a general perception in small countries of common fate and the spread of common fears. Additionally, he detects in the small countries a penchant for neutrality; a weakness of the political right; a dependence on foreign capital to supplement internal savings, and a tenor of domestic political stability induced by the need to secure access to export markets. As a response to their position in the international economy, small countries have developed specific institutions to maintain competitiveness in key industries and mechanisms compensating domestic losers when readjustment becomes necessary because of imported disruptions."
Op deze manier compenseren kleine landen voor gebrek aan schaalvoordelen en specialisatie in low-tech producten, en realiseren ze toch hoge inkomens per persoon.
"The basic line of reasoning here is the following: in nations where the institutional set-up supports the establishment of trust between non-kin agents, and especially where this is combined with a credit-based financial system, firms tend to be involved in co-operative networks. Therefor they will be able to share their risks with network partners."
"Four kinds of institutions are especially important in the context of learning and innovation: the time horizon of agents, the role of trust, the actual mix of rationality, and the way authority is expressed." Blijkbaar moet de rationaliteit niet al te instrumenteel zijn.
"A nation's economic structure and its specific economic activities thus reflect accumulated national learning while at the same time pointing to the route of future learning and innovation". [Lijkt me een mooi citaat voor boven de innovatienota van het volgende kabinet.]
En een uitsmijter die minder leuk is maar ik toch maar even weergeef: "Furthermore, the popular resistance to the European project in many quarters might also be less irrational and nostalgic than it appears: it reflects, at least in part, the insight that the direct access of vested interests to the European bureaucracy and the lack of democratic transparancy are factors hampering the accumulation of social capital, thereby weakening the economic foundation of some of the small nations."
Kortom een juweeltje van een paper: Bengt-Ake Lundvall and Peter Maskell: Nation States and Economic Development: from national systems of production to national systems of knowledge creation and learning.
In: Clark et al. Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography
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