Introduction: Innovation, growth and development in Latin-America: Stylized facts and a policy agenda

Abstract

SummaryMany studies have shown that the long-term economic growth of industrialized economies stems from the enlargement of technological activities that lead to new products, processes or industries, as well as improving productivity. Some newly industrializing countries have achieved remarkable increases in innovative output in the last decades, suggesting that they have expanded their national technological capabilities. However, an unanswered question is how science and technology, which appear to be the key to industrial development in advanced economies, can be effectively used for economic and social development in today’s developing countries.To a large extent, this depends on the ability of these countries to build up a trajectory of learning and innovation. So far, such trajectories have mostly resulted by default, as an unplanned consequence of ‘learning by doing’ during the expansion of local production activities, or of ‘adaptive engineering efforts’ carried out on the basis of imported know-how. The real challenge therefore seems to be how to go from this to a ‘pro-active’ technological strategy that would put major innovation efforts and technological generation activities in the driver’s seat of the development process.This Introduction attempts three different objectives. Firstly, it sets the conceptual background for the papers included in this special issue. Secondly, it reports on recent research on innovation carried out in Latin America and suggests lines of future inquiry. Thirdly, it introduces the papers included in this special issue. For this purpose, Section 1 outlines some stylized facts of the Latin-American development process. Section 2 sketches out what we know and what we need to investigate more about innovation, growth and development in Latin America. Finally, in Section 3 we summarize the contribution of the papers included in this edition describing the current state of knowledge in this field with lessons for other developing economies.