Comparing the performance of technological and social capabilities in Latin American and East Asian countries, 2000-2012

Abstract

The factors that explain economic development of a country continue to generate controversies, even after decades of scientific advances. In line with heterodox tradition, this paper accepts the divergence in the level of development as something intrinsic to the creative destruction process of Technological Revolutions. By this token, the objectives here are: (i) to check for a longer period, the adequacy of relations, already tested once between a set of analytical dimensions can influence the processes of economic development of countries and (ii) to present and discuss evidences of progresses and setbacks of National Innovation Systems of Latin American and East Asian countries. For this, technological ad social capabilities were analyzed, relying on multivariate statistical analysis and econometric. In addition, variations in the performance of the technological and social capacities of three Latin American countries and three of East Asia were also observed and compared rapidly. The results indicate that the higher growth rate of Chinese and South Korean per capita income was sustained by the rapid growth of their technological capabilities, but also by different social capacities, while Argentina, Brazil and Mexico lost the best moment in decades, the commodity boom.