When you're a latecomer to a language, what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration.

Internationalizing firms from developing countries are pursuing strategies that enable them to catch up with established players, leveraging their latecomer advantages.

For latecomer enterprises, the process appears to move faster and to involve applying learning acquired from one market in the next (Mathews 2002).

Mathews JA (2002). Competitive advantages of the latecomer firm A resource based account of industrial catch up strategies. Asia Pacific Journal of Management 19 (4) 467 488.

If you look at the word salvation in the Bible the Christian usage that we're familiar with saving souls, that people go to heaven that's actually a latecomer.

The second wave firms take advantage of the benefits of globalization and leverage on their latecomer advantages, particularly by using advanced technology and management systems to accelerate their internationalization through global connections and linkages with existing transnational corporations (TNCs).

China became one of the 13 economies after 1979. Because the country s latecomer status explains its 33 years of rapid economic growth, the key to understanding its potential for further rapid growth in the future lies in estimating how large those advantages still are.

In order to exploit its latecomer advantage, China must deepen its reforms and eliminate its economy s residual distortions. Meanwhile, the government should play a proactive role in overcoming the market failures such as externalities and coordination problems that are certain to accompany technological innovation and industrial upgrading.

How much faster is an empirical question. According to the Growth Commission led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, 13 economies took full advantage of their latecomer status after World War II and achieved annual GDP growth rates of 7 or higher at least twice as high as developed countries growth rates for 25 years or longer.

To calculate how much of a latecomer advantage China has after 35 years of unprecedented growth, one needs to look at the gap between its levels of technological and industrial development and those of high income countries. The best way to see this is by comparing its per capita income, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), with those of developed countries.

Lin argues that China can achieve 8 annual growth for another two decades, owing to its enduring latecomer advantage, which, among other things, entails rapid productivity gains brought about by technological catch up with the United States. But this fails to account for the standard growth theory of conditional convergence only economies with comparable structural characteristics, such as labor skills and institutional quality, converge to similar per capita income levels.

Based on the experiences of successful countries, every developing country has the potential to sustain 8 annual growth (or higher) for several decades, and to become a middle or even a high income country in one or two generations. The key is to have the right policy framework in place to facilitate private sector alignment with the country s comparative advantages, and to benefit from latecomer advantages in the process of structural change.

If the latecomer s advantage implied by the income gap between the four NIEs and the US enabled the NIEs to realize average annual GDP growth rates of 7.6 9.2 for 20 years, China s annual growth potential should be a similar 8 for the 2008 2028 period. To realize its potential growth as a latecomer, China needs, above all, to deepen its market oriented reforms, address various structural problems, and develop its economy according to its comparative advantages.