Kristin Ranestad (Economic History Department Paul Bairoch, University of Geneva)
This paper is an introduction to a PhD research project which involves comparing two resource based economies, Chile and Norway. They have shared significant commonalities, however experienced different economic development paths. When studying modern economic growth technological change and innovation are decisive to structural changes in an economy due to their influence on products, production processes, efficiency and productivity. Differences in technological advance seem therefore decisive when seeking to explain variations in growth performance and the standard of living among the world’s countries. Scholars argue that we need to go further into the historical analysis and analyse specific institutions which encouraged the expansion of “useful knowledge” supporting technology. The idea is that “knowledge institutions” in various societies were consciously created and that this contributed to technological change and ultimately to industrial development and economic growth. The aim of the project is to analyse the creation, transfer, diffusion and use of “useful knowledge” in the Chilean and Norwegian mining sectors in the period between 1870 and 1940. There are examples in both countries of similar local knowledge institutions which aimed to stimulate and promote industrial development. Mining societies, research institutions, mining journals and mining education institutions were among institutions which were established in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The hypothesis is that the Norwegian knowledge institutions played a more important role in expanding useful knowledge than the Chilean ones.
