Is technological leadership decisive for competitiveness?

The literature dealing with technological changes is very diverse and voluminous. It covers dif-ferent areas of researchers’ interests, such as: analyzing either technological capabilities or achievements, measuring new technology diffusion, innovative inputs and outputs and their impacts to productivity rise, studying the importance of technological changes for endogenous macro growth and so on. Approaches based on results of endogenous growth theory, as well as analysis derived from na-tional innovation systems’ theory, were exactly those which emphasized that national technological capability can be understood as major source of international economic competitiveness. They rest on the following ideas: greater initial stock of knowledge enables achieving higher level of productivity, whereas more human capital (devoted to research and development) produces increase of country’s innovativeness; innovations (even less significant ones) reduce production costs, this way positively influencing competitiveness of the country on global market. It seems that technology and competitiveness represent two sides of the same “coin”: this way technology turns out to be the instrument of inducing global competitiveness, whereas taking part in globalization processes appears to be impossible without technology progress. As it was noticed a long ago, global competitiveness (wide “spectrum” of advantages one country possessed) represents the result of diverse strategies carried out by corporations and national economies. That is why in this paper we wonder whether those countries achieving the greatest growth during last fifty years have something in common regarding technology development strategy, but also ask ourselves can other, developing economies, rely on and “copy” (at least partially) the above-mentioned examples.