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: squeiroz@ige.unicamp.br

Technovation 26 (2006) 543

www.elsevier.com/locate/technovation