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Productive Inertia and Technical Change

Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Station d'Economie et de Sociologie Rurales, Place Viala 340 60, Montpellier, Cedex 1, France

How can we evaluate the direction and dynamics of technical change? Indicators or analyses are often based on the immediate causes such as innovation, investment in R&D, or on the anticipated effects such as improved competitiveness and creation of new products. Anxious to demonstrate the economic or social benefits, the forecast ing impact is often reduced to risky comparisons between these two sets of data. This recording of change takes into account only the immediate situation, that is, the short-term. But technical change is first and foremost the product of the long history of societies. The recording of variations, the introduction of variables considered as exogenous, even if it facilitates the introduction of rationality into the choice which presides over change, in no way enables us to understand its origins and the evolution.

It is essential that we restore the dimension of time to technical change and to consider it as the product of contradictory forces. In this paper it is proposed that the relationship between changes and non-changes in techniques includes the idea of inertia. Although changes are manifest and justify the analyses which have been devoted to them, non-changes have rarely been taken into consideration. The role of inertia appears even more clearly when the rate of growth slows down, as social values are called into question, as price or regulatory systems are transformed. These considerations have an impact on the formulation of technological policies. They permit a redefinition of industrial innovation strategies in a context which should permit their social and economic insertion.

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