Comment on: ‘‘Importing technology’’$

On a rainy day in Cambridge four years ago Francesco Caselli told me about a project he was launching on measuring international technology adoption. The idea was to exploit the product dimension of trade data by recording the dates when individual countries first import a substantial quantity of computer equipment. This measure would be particularly well suited for developing nations: they are unlikely to produce computer equipment themselves, hence their adoption of computer technology would necessarily appear in the form of imported equipment. The measure would be simple to implement given the efforts of Feenstra et al. (1997) in making the necessary trade data widely available. Most important, the measure would fill an information void given the paucity of other measures of international technology diffusion. This project that Francesco told me about has resulted in a paper with John Coleman (Caselli and Coleman, 2001) and the present extension with Daniel Wilson.