Extractive industries can spur new activities and encourage diversification: while the possibility of processing profitably everything that is underground should not be overestimated, the promotion of backward linkages (local firms supplying goods and services to big extractive firms) holds the promise of job creation and technological spill-overs.
Because economists could not measure spillovers or delimit their scope ("How far does a technological spillover spill?" Mr Krugman wondered), they could invoke them to explain just about anything.Mr Krugman's models instead identified a less elusive benefit of proximity.
The extant literature on knowledge diffusion, however, has not been able to explain which characteristics of knowledge increase the likelihood that knowledge will remain within its own technological field or spill over to other technologies.
But in the meantime, there is a push for someone to guide the technological currents that are spilling across disparate business units and functions.
By contrast, the carrot of green subsidies is better suited to dealing with a narrower and positive externality — the spill-over effects of technological innovation aimed at reducing CO2 emission.
In other words, there appear to be few synergy effects in terms of genuine spill-over effects and technological transfer between the firms.
Between the two largest spills in America, Apple's technological growth was phenomenal.
They say the catastrophic failure involving the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20 — which took 11 lives and started the worst offshore oil spill in United States history — will drive the technological progress.
Technological advances and market forces have allowed these toxins to spill profitably into rightwing pseudo-journalism and the sewers of social media.
Just a month ago, the spill was an uncontrolled calamity: Macondo mocked the technological skills of the world's petroleum engineers, and oil was slathering birds and turtles and tar-balling hundreds of miles of coastline.
IT diffuses throughout the economy; they engender extensive spill overs in the forms of externalizes and technological complementarities, and their evolution and diffusion span for decades (the information technology and innovation foundation, 2014).
