This study attempts to explain successive changes in industrial leadership in IT services by employing the catch-up cycle theory developed by Lee and Malerba (Res Policy 46(2):338–351, 2017). A catch-up cycle was observed in which leadership have changed from the US to Ireland and subsequently to India. Currently, there is now a `coexistent leadership` in which both India and Ireland share the leadership position since Ireland has recently recovered some of its market shares. The research has two main contributions: First, it has introduced macroeconomic variables into the catch-up cycle framework and exposed that the over-reliance of Ireland on MNCs made their leadership less sustainable and more sensitive to macroeconomic variations, and thus, argued that wage rate, exchange rate and FDI were important explanatory variables to understand the rise, fall and re-rise of Irish IT service exports. Second, it is shown that India has been more effective in maintaining a leadership position by developing strong indigenous companies, a sectoral system of innovation and through better technological capabilities. Therefore, it brings an important contribution in terms of public policies and catch-up strategies.

本研究试图通过利用Lee和Malerba开发的追赶周期理论来解释IT服务行业领先地位的连续变化（Res Policy 46（2）：338-351，2017）。观察到了追赶周期，领导层已从美国转移到爱尔兰，然后又转移到了印度。目前，由于爱尔兰最近已恢复了部分市场份额，印度和爱尔兰现在都拥有“共存领导权”。该研究有两个主要贡献：首先，它已将宏观经济变量引入到追赶周期框架中，并暴露出爱尔兰对跨国公司的过度依赖导致其领导能力的可持续性下降，并且对宏观经济的变化更加敏感，因此认为工资速度，汇率和外国直接投资是理解爱尔兰IT服务出口的上升，下降和再上升的重要解释变量。其次，事实表明，印度通过发展强大的本土公司，创新的部门体系以及更好的技术能力，在保持领导地位方面更加有效。因此，它在公共政策和追赶战略方面做出了重要贡献。