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Although the significance of technological progress in economic development is well-established in theory and policy, it has remained challenging to agree upon shared priorities for strategies and policies. This paper aims to develop a model of how policymakers can develop effective and easy to communicate strategies for science, technology and economic development.

By integrating insights from economic complexity, competitiveness and foresight literature, a replicable research framework for analysing the opportunities and challenges of technological revolutions for small catching-up countries is developed. The authors highlight key lessons from piloting this framework for informing the strategy and policies for bioeconomy in Estonia towards 2030–2050.

The integration of economic complexity research with traditional foresight methods establishes a solid analytical basis for a data-driven analysis of the opportunities for industrial upgrading. The increase in the importance of regional alliances in the global economy calls for further advancement of the analytical toolbox. Integration of complexity, global value chains and export potential assessment approaches offers valuable direction for further research, as it enables discussion of the opportunities of moving towards more knowledge-intensive economic activities along with the opportunities for winning international market share.

The research merges insights from the economic complexity, competitiveness and foresight literature in a novel way and illustrates the applicability and priority-setting in a real-life setting.

This article sets out to answer two interrelated questions: is it advisable for developing countries to use public procurement efforts for development, and should more developing countries join the World Trade Organization (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement (GPA)? We survey key arguments for and against joining the GPA, and argue that government procurement should not be seen only as an indirect support measure for development, but also as a direct vehicle for promoting innovation and industries and, thus, growth and development. We also show that using public procurement for development assumes high levels of policy capacity, which most developing countries lack. In addition, we show how the GPA as well as other WTO agreements make it complicated for the developing countries to benefit from public procurement for innovation. The article suggests that the developing countries could apply a mix of direct and indirect (so-called soft) public-procurement-for-innovation measures. In order to do this, developing countries need to develop the policy capacity to take advantage of the complex and multi-layered industrial policy space still available under WTO rules.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to contribute to the theoretical discussion on shared service centres (SSCs) for public sector accounting by putting forth a novel typology of different SSCs and their creation modes, and outlining the challenges these specific models are likely to face. Second, it uses the Estonian case study to test the theoretical conjectures.

Since in the Estonian central government different reform models for creating SSCs for public sector accounting have been tried out, the Estonian case offers an opportunity for exploring what the motives behind the creation of different forms of SSCs can be and what kind of challenges reform actors can face when opting for different reform models. The sources of data for the qualitative case study included official documents, media articles and interviews.

The Estonian case study demonstrates that the distinct reform models for creating SSCs in public sector accounting can indeed have different motives and also face various challenges to different degrees. Some challenges, however, are present in all reform models (e.g. difficulties in achieving customer orientation and reduced input to managerial decision making).

This paper puts forth a novel typology of public sector SSC reform models and analyses the challenges these different reform models are likely to face. The theoretical contribution and the Estonian case study are valuable for both academics and practitioners analysing or considering the creation of SSCs.