Industrial Espionage
By 
My latest at the Diplomat highlights some new work on the impact of industrial espionage:
States behave as if industrial espionage is important; developing countries undertake extensive efforts to steal from advanced countries, and advanced countries take steps to protect their advanced technology from theft. In the Cold War, for example, the United States developed and enforced an elaborate system of export controls designed to prevent advanced military and industrial technology from falling into the hands of the Soviets. Today, U.S. officials relentlessly complain about Chinese intellectual property theft, and China continues to steal IP.
But scholars have struggled to demonstrate much actual impact. Industrial espionage competes with domestic R&D, with potentially far reaching negative effects. Also, backwards economies often have trouble incorporating stolen technology into the industrial bases. The Soviet Union continuously had difficulty taking advantage of successful industrial espionage operation during the Cold War, with acquisitions often leading to technical dead-ends rather than sustained progress.
The new paper by Albrecht Glitz and Erik Meyersson suggests that, in at least some cases, industrial espionage works.