Technological stock and the rate of technical change

Abstract: Since the dawn of the capitalist epoch, most advanced countries have seen more than a hundred fold change in their total products. This combined with a near five fold change in population size had brought a huge windfall of wealth in these countries. The main engine for this capitalist machine has been the accelaration of technical progress (Maddison, 1982). In this paper we investigate for the positive relationship between the existing stock of technology and accelaration of technical progress. We use the time series data from 1982-2002 to test our regression model. The model encapsulates annual patents turnover (proxy for acceleration of technical progress), patent stock (proxy for technological stock) and R&D expenditures of four advanced countries as the primary variables, where the former acts as the dependent variable and the later two act as the determinant variables. The model projects a highly significant positive relationship between technology stock and the pace of technological progress, endorsing our hypothesis.