Natural Resource Industries as a Platform for the Development of Knowledge Intensive Industries

ANABEL MARIN; CARLOTA PEREZ; LIZBETH NAVAZ ALEMAN

Journal of Economic and Social Geography

Wiley BlackWell

Año: 2012

1467-9663

The innovation and development literature demonstrates that at particular times some industries are able to innovate and grow faster than others. The success of the Asian Tigers in their process of catching up showed that is possible to take advantage of this situation. Having cheap labour, they engaged in a very successful process of catching up, by specialising in the more labour-intensive technologically dynamic industries at that time (e.g. electronics) and, achieved significant rates of growth. The window of opportunity used by Asian Tigers is no longer available to LAC and African newcomers. These countries do not have the same resources, and the industries that drive driving economic growth have changed significantly. Newcomers need to identify a new technological opportunity space. We argue that there is a new window of opportunity for these Natural Resource-Rich Countries (NRRCs). The demand for natural resources is increasing and, there is a growing urgency everywhere to access these resources. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews briefly the resource curse literature. Section 3 challenges the evidence and main rationale of this literature. Section 4 provides a brief analysis of the main changes in the world economy that are opening new opportunities for innovation in NRs. Section 5 presents the empirical evidence. Section 6 concludes identifying the main challenges for a strategy based on NRs.