Sources and contexts of technologicalopportunities in different industries in LatinAmerica

ANABEL MARIN; SERGIO PETRALIA; CLAUDIO BRAVO ORTEGA

Otro; XLVIII Reunión Anual de AAEP (Asociación Argentina de Economía Política); 2013

Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Estadística de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario y el Consejo Profesional de Ciencias Económicas de la Provincia de Santa Fe

It is widely accepted within the innovation and development literatures that some industries offer higher potential for growth and development than others. The general idea is that industries with high technological dynamism offer higher potential for growth and development. There is still a large element of uncertainty, however, as to which are the most dynamic industries for each country. This paper proposes to use the concept of technological opportunity (TO) to investigate the technological dynamism of manufacturing industries of two Latin American Countries (LACs): Argentina and Brazil. Our results do not support the well spread idea that traditional industries, in particular those strongly associated to Natural Resources (NRs), have and create less Technological opportunities, and therefore, are less dynamic than others. They question, therefore, the adequacy of generic policies aimed at encouraging ?high-tech? sectors, and suggest that context specific research needs to be conducted to identify which are the technologically dynamic industries within each country.