Esforço inovativo e produtividade industrial: determinantes internos e externos à firma

Abstract

The technological composition and the productive diversification are distinguishing features of countries’ growth trajectories. Such differences are usually employed to justify the structural unbalances of developing countries’ trade balances, as a result of the uneven generation and diffusion of technological progress between economies. Given the existence of a technological gap, an alternative way out to the dependent condition would be massive investments in R&D, infrastructure and technology, in the search for a better growth path. Regarding the industrial sector as the most dynamic sector of the economy, the present thesis examine how backward countries should target the strategy of investing in knowledge absorption to overcome this condition. Assuming Brazil is a backward economy, the efforts to close the gap should modify its productive structure and increase its productivity level, creating the conditions to endogeneize the technological progress. Herein, it is crucial to identify the factors which determine the investments in knowledge absorption and how these affect the firms’ performance in terms of productivity. In a combined analysis of the PIA (Annual Industrial Survey) – Local Units and the PINTEC (Innovation Survey) for the years of 2008, 2011 and 2014, the results suggest that the determinants of the innovative efforts (regarded as creators of “absorptive capacity”) internal to the firm behave as theoretically expected, in that technological opportunities, appropriability conditions, cooperation and qualified labor force positively affect the expenditure in R&D activities. The same variables, except for the internal labor force profile, also positively affect the expenditure on “Machinery and Equipment” and that on “Training”. The city level determinants suggest that the “Machinery and Equipment” as well as the “Training” expenditures were positively affected by the specialized space, in which the urbanization and space diversification didn’t affect neither types of expenditure. The absence of a positive influence from the diversified space in determining R&D expenditure suggests that such space is frail in Brazil. Another finding is that the investments in absorptive capacity weren’t able to increase the productivity of Brazilian industrial firms. Moreover, the municipal indicators showed that city growth and the distance to São Paulo negatively affect the productivity growth. These results help explaining the Brazilian current industrial situation, which has been directed towards lower technological complexity and, therefore has been demanding little investments in R&D related activities, as well as has been little influenced by the externalities of the “localized space”. In the meantime, it is possible to assume that the advances in the productivity of traditional sectors are little expressive, given that the technologies are more mature and established. That would justify the absence of a positive influence of the “absorptive” expenditure. In that sense, it is assumed that unless coordinated and enduring efforts are sought, the Brazilian industry should remain leaning towards low technology patterns of specialization that do not offer the conditions for endogenizing the technological progress, remaining in a dependent condition.