Brazil, a non-learning society: new perspectives on science, technology and innovation
Keywords:
Economic development, Productive sophistication, Complexity, Increasing returns, Technological progress,Abstract
Economic development is a structural transformation that takes people from agriculture to industry and then to modern services; a process known as an “industrial revolution”. Brazil was able to move on with this process until the 1980s; midway, the economy stalled and then regressed. Its productive system moved towards diversification and increased complexity until the 2000s, then it regressed and started to specialize in less complex products. We have turned the economy of bakers, hairdressers, manicurists and shopkeepers, namely: non-scalable services, with limited productivity and scant technological development. This paper reflects on the causes of this technological regress, based on the new economy of complexity, exploring concepts such as network externality, agglomeration economies and increasing returns to scale to understand how Brazil can escape its comparative (dis) advantages so as to become a learning society.
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