Inter-Sector Technology Spillover Effects on Technology Diffusion: A Social Network Analysis

In the second half of the twenty century the U.S. economy went through important transformations in terms of both production and network structure between sectors, and also in terms of technology adoption. Using a network perspective we question how these changes in the inter-sector network structure have influenced the process of technology adoption. To address this issue we map Input-Output Use Tables from 1945-1995 into a weighted directed network. We found that: (i) the local and global production network properties are directly related to size of the local and global technology spillovers, (ii) the local and free global spillovers have, in general, a statistically significant and positive effect on technology diffusion, (iii) on the contrary, the controlled global technology spillovers captured by the network betweenness have, in general, a negative effect on technology diffusion, and (iv) both local and global incoming spillover effects tend to be relatively more important than the outgoing spillovers.