Globalisation and the technology gap: Regional and time evidence

This chapter examines the relationship between globalisation and technological progress. It computes an annual and country specific measure of technological gap, the technology ratio (TGR), using a recently proposed method known as metafrontiers. The TGR is measured as the distance from a group frontier to the global (or meta) frontier. The TGRs provide a measure to compare technological capability across countries. The ranking obtained from the metafrontiers method is first compared to other methods based on the direct measure of patents, science articles, schooling etc. The TGRs are then related to levels of trade openness and inbound and outbound foreign direct investment within regions and overtime in an effort to identify the relationship between technological gap and outward orientation.

Rural lines of flight: Telecommunications and post-metro dreaming

Information and communications technologies hold a prominent place in the cultural imagination of many people living outside the Australian metropolis, especially recent émigrés. A vision of a wired pastoral conjures up the possibilities of city work, connections and pleasures accompanying the flight to the country. Such aspirations have given a twist to one of the great topos of Australian post-invasion communications history, communications ameliorating the perceived isolation in the bush. This article examines important changes to rural telecommunications in the 1990s coinciding with post-metro dreaming and digital convergence, namely the rise of local telecommunications. Neo-Foucauldian accounts of citizenship hold some promise for explaining the criss-cross of tangled lines of flight in regional communications in the twenty-first century: emergent subjectivities, utopian digital modes of becoming, new politics of infrastructure, reconfigured relationships among state, market and citizen.