Universities , Regional Policy and the Knowledge Economy
نویسنده
چکیده
This article focuses on the spatial clustering dimension of new information and communications technology (ICT)-driven economic activity based on knowledge industries and especially the tacit knowledge synergies to be achieved through networking in geographical space. The article first details the new knowledge economy, reviewing claims made for its distinctiveness and its role in raising levels of productivity before turning to a brief study of the clustering effects of new ICT-driven economic activity and the development of policies designed to enhance regional development. The remainder of the article details a case study – Univercities: the Manchester Knowledge Capital Initiative – in the North-west of the United Kingdom based on recent research into the attempt to create a ‘Knowledge Capital’ within the Greater Manchester conurbation, which is designed to position Manchester at the heart of the knowledge economy. Introduction: the new economy? In the West educational policy has given way to talk of the knowledge economy under the sway of world policy organisations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. The terms ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge capitalism’ emerged in the mid-1990s to become national policy templates for many Western governments and developing economies. The United Kingdom (UK) Government, for example, has pronounced the end of the comprehensive school, based on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ welfare-state ideology, and signalled a shift to a fully consumer-driven system of public services in health and education, Michael A. Peters & Tim May 264 based on the market ideology of choice and diversity. This shift to the ‘social market’ is underwritten and accompanied by an emphasis on national competitiveness within the global economy and the way in which the ‘new economy’ demands new levels of flexible skilled knowledge workers. This chapter examines the discourse of the knowledge economy and education as an ‘industry of the future’ that can promote regional development, with the attendant emphasis on public–private partnerships and the cultural reconstruction of city entrepreneurial cultures and clustering of knowledge capital activities. Digitalisation, speed and compression are the forces at work that have transformed the global economy and now have begun to affect every aspect of knowledge production – its organisation, storage, retrieval, and transmission. The knowledge economy has certainly arrived, although this does not mean the end of the business cycle, as many early advocates of the new economy maintained. But it does signal structural economic shifts and new sources of growth in some Western economies (e.g. USA, Finland) that delivered both low unemployment and low inflation due to increased productivity. While it is clear that investment in ICT (information and communications technology) and ICT-driven productivity growth has led to a higher growth path, there is a risk of exaggerating the growth potential due to ICT investment alone. Yet as a recent OECD report The New Economy: beyond the hype (2001) put it: It would be wrong to conclude that there was nothing exceptional about the recent US experience, that the new economy was in fact a myth. Some of the arguments posited by new economy sceptics are of course true: the effect of ICT may be no greater than other important inventions of the past, like electricity generation and the internal combustion engine. Moreover, far greater productivity surges were recorded in previous decades, not least in the period before the 1970s. (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/262380634.pdf) Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that something new is taking place in the structure of OECD economies (p. 10). The report continues by maintaining that ICT has facilitated productivity enhancing changes in the firm, in both new and traditional industries, but only when accompanied with greater skills and changes in the organisation of work. Consequently, policies that engage ICT, human capital, innovation and entrepreneurship in the growth process, alongside fundamental policies to control inflation and instil competition, while controlling public finances are likely to bear the most fruit over the longer term. (p. 10) Crucially, the report investigates and recommends a set of relationships and policies that harness ICT, human capital, innovation and business creation, focusing on the wider diffusion of ICT and the role of education and training policies in meeting today’s skill requirements. UNIVERSITIES, REGIONAL POLICY AND THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY 265 Clearly, the Internet economy is becoming an integral part of the global economy, creating jobs, increasing productivity and transforming companies and institutions. Employment in the Internet economy is growing faster than in the traditional economy. In the US economy alone the Internet generated an estimated $830 billion in revenues in 2000, which represented a 58% increase over 1989.[1] J. Bradford De Long, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the US Department of the Treasury, depicts the ‘new economy’, asserting it is both a knowledge and an innovation knowledge where clusters of innovation, based on new technologies and new business models, succeed each other. He maintains it is likely to continue for an extended time and its consequences are pervasive. He provides an analytical overview of the digital economy which conveys how different it is from the market economy of orthodox economics. He likens the digital economy to the enclosure of the common lands in early modern Britain, which paved the way for the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Digital commodities, he maintains, do not behave like standard goods and services of economic theory: they are non-rivalrous, barely excludable and not transparent. The store of music tracks is not diminished when one downloads a track from the Internet; it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict distribution of goods that can be reproduced with no or little cost, and; a consumer does not know how good software is before purchase or indeed how its successor versions will perform in the future. It is important to recognise that the knowledge economy is both classical and new. Danny Quah of the London School of Economics indicates that the economic importance of knowledge can be found in examples where deployment of machines boosted economic performance such as in the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, he talks of the ‘weightless economy’, ‘where the economic significance of knowledge achieves its greatest contemporary resonance’ and suggests it comprises four main elements: 1. Information and communications technology (ICT), the Internet. 2. Intellectual assets: Not only patents and copyrights but also, more broadly, name brands, trademarks, advertising, financial and consulting services, and education. 3. Electronic libraries and databases: including new media, video entertainment, and broadcasting. 4. Biotechnology: carbon-based libraries and databases, pharmaceuticals. (http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/dquah/tweirl0.html) Elsewhere he argues: Digital goods are bitstrings, sequences of 0s and 1s, that have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are nonrival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant. (Quah, 2003, http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/dquah/dp-
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