Visible Costs and Invisible Benefits, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017 Military Procurement as Innovation Policy Economics of Science, Technology and Innovation Series

This book examines the historic role of professional and demanding military customers in industrial development. Particular emphasis is paid to public procurement of military equipment as a catalyst for innovation; and the civilian commercialization of military technologies (from gunpowder and cannons to submarines, missiles and aircraft) is documented by many case illustrations that show how macro-level productivity advance has been generated. A complementary volume to Advancing Public Procurement as Industrial Policy (2010), which focused on the spillover effects of the Swedish combat aircraft, Gripen, in this book Gunnar Eliasson widens the perspective to cover product development across the Swedish defense industry, with an emphasis on regional economic development and macro-economics, inter alia through the involvement of Saab (aircraft) and Kockums (submarines) in partnership ventures in Australia, Norway and Brazil. 

Executive Summary.- Chapter 1 Background and Economic Political Context.- Part I: Customer Competence, Military Technology and Civilian Industry.- Chapter 2 The Role of the Competent and Demanding Customer and Technological Product Competition in Industrial Evolution.- Chapter 3 Public Procurement of Privacy Demanded Public Goods as Innovation Policy.- Part II: Spillover Measurement: From Cases to Macro.- Chapter 4 The Swedish Military Aircraft Industry.- Chapter 5 Spillovers on Weapons Development and Civilian Technology Creation.- Chapter 6 The Linköping, Karlskoga and Gothenburg/ Mölndahl New Industrial Districts based on Military Technologies.- Chapter 7 Military Vehiciles on Land and at Sea.- Chapter 8 Worker and Engineer Learning on the Australian Collins Submarine Project.- Chapter 9 Industrial Competence Bloc Formation around Submarine Design.- Chapter 10 Indigenous Development or Buying off-the-shelf.- Part III: Theory and Empirical Method.- Chapter 11 Competition, Industrial Competence Bloc Formation and the Evolution of an Experimentally Organized Economy (EOE).- Chapter 12 Public Procurement of Privately Demanded Public Goods as Innovation Policy.- Chapter 13 Theories, Choice of Models and Estimation Methods.- Chapter 14 Economy Wide, Dynamic Long Term Model Based Cost Benefit Calculations.- Part IV: Political Economics.- Chapter 15 Political Economics.

Gunnar Eliasson is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Economics/Dynamics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. He is associated with the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum in Stockholm as a senior researcher and adviser. He was previously President of the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (IUI, now IFN) in Stockholm, and before that Chief Economist and Director of the Economic Policy department at the Federation of Swedish Industries. He is a member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and has served on several firm and other boards, among them the Royal Institute of Art. He has been a consultant to many firms in Sweden and abroad, to Government agencies and to the OECD. From 1994 to 1996 he was the President of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society.

Gunnar Eliasson has published many books and journal articles in the fields of industrial economics, the theory of the firm, business economic planning and management, labor and education economics and simulation modeling. He is the father of the Swedish Micro to Macro simulation model MOSES and the theory of the Experimentally Organized Economy and of Competence Blocs, in which customer competence and commercialization markets guide the selection of projects that endogenously drives economic development. Among the articles can be mentioned the presentation of the Micro to Macro model in the American Economic Review (1977), “The firm as a competent team” (1990) in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO) and the “Incomplete Schumpeter Stockholm School connection” (2014) in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. The latter presents the theory of an experimentally organized economy as a merger of Austrian Schumpeterian and Stockholm School economics, a theme in evolutionary economics and complexity economics that is further pursued in this new book.

His books in English include The