Innovation system and developing countries: the Argentine's failure

Abstract

Argentina, in the 1990s within the liberalisation reforms' context, just purchased modern foreign technologies without making any innovation efforts. Conversely, other developing countries carried out institutional interventions in order to generate social and technological knowledge. The evidence included in this paper demonstrates that during the economic and productivity growth period (1991-1998), firms were not concerned by innovation activities. Consequently, it was impossible to build up a National Innovation System, supported, in essence, on national learning. Accordingly, our main hypothesis is: "importing new technology is not enough to encourage the innovation process, if there is lack of innovation effort".