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Book review
Systems of Innovation and Development—Evidence
from Brazil; Jose Eduardo Cassiolato, Helena Maria
Martins Lastres, Maria Lucia Maciel (Eds.); Edward
Elgar (New Horizons in the Economics of Innovation
series, edited by Christopher Freeman); Cheltenham UK
and Northampton, MA, USA; 2003; ISBN 1 84376 231 5
During 1970s and 1980s a considerable amount of
empirical work on processes of learning and technical
change taking place in developing countries, especially in
Latin America and Asia, contributed decisively to our
understanding of the dynamics of technological and
economic progress. As these countries were no longer
seen as mere importers of technology developed abroad, the
conventional view of the ‘choice of technique’ was rejected
as an oversimplification. Rather this work suggested a much
more complex process of acquisition of technological
capabilities, in which the importance of inner determinants
was clearly underlined. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the
global economic transformations—in their multiple dimen-
sions, i.e. financial, productive and technological—shifted
the focus from local dynamics to the international arena. As
a result, the role of indigenous elements was diminished and
the fate of developing countries appeared to be once again
determined mainly by external conditions.
This book puts things in the right perspective, recogniz-
ing the importance of considering both those internal and
external elements. As a general aim, it seeks to balance the
(growing) influence that comes from abroad with the
determinants rooted in the national economy in order to
understand the potentialities and, above all, the obstacles to
development. Therefore, it organizes the collection of
articles, which comprises the volume in two parts. The
first one discusses the characteristics, the drivers and the
impacts (including on policy) of the global current
transformations. The second brings a number of case studies
of local systems of production and/or innovation in Brazil—
the main results of a research project carried out by a
network spanning seven Brazilian universities.
However, the task is not completely successful. The
general picture does not provide a clear vision of the
interplay between the global and the local processes. In
the first part, the contributions are quite disparate and in
doi:10.1016/j.technovation.2005.06.007
some cases add more perplexity than clarity to the question
of how the profound social, economic and cultural changes
of present times are affecting development conditions in
countries like Brazil. In addition, the impact of global
transformations to the development of Brazilian systems of
production or innovation cannot be reduced to the liberal
reforms (privatization, deregulation, adoption of a free-trade
tariff etc.) as assumed by a number of works of the second
part.
In any case, and independently of more or less coherence
of the ensemble, the summation of individual contributions
is quite rewarding for the reader. Firstly, a number of
articles do provide interesting discussions linking global
processes to development perspectives in peripheral
countries. The work of Francois Chesnais and Catherine
Sauviat, for example, shows how some changes in corporate
governance pushed forward by financial globalization have
effects on the financing of long-term innovation-related
investment, with particular consequences on non-Triad
countries. Or the article by Hubert Schmitz, that links two
bodies of the literature—on industrial clusters and on global
value chains—in order to discuss how developing countries
can upgrade their insertion in the global economy.
Secondly, most of the articles of the first part offer
conceptual or methodological elements which are important
both to advance theoretical knowledge and to better
understand the nature of current global changes. Even the
work on an apparently more transient topic, such as Chris
Freeman’s discussion about a possible hard landing for the
US economy, brings insightful theoretical contributions on
the role of information technology in the functioning of
markets.
Finally, one cannot overlook the importance of accumu-
lating empirical knowledge on such relevant subjects. The
works presented in the second part should certainly be
received with interest by all readers who want to understand
more about ongoing technological and productive develop-
ments in Brazil.
Sergio Queiroz
University of Campinas—Unicamp, Rua Joao Pandia
Calogeras, 51 CEP 13083-970 Campinas, Brazil
E-mail address: [email protected]
Technovation 26 (2006) 543
www.elsevier.com/locate/technovation