The Software and Information Services Sector in Argentina: Pros and Cons of an Inward-Orientated Development Strategy

software information services, developing countries, Argentina

South-south trade in capital goods the latin american experience

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The software and information services sector in Argentina: Pros and cons of an inward-oriented development strategy

The software and information services (SIS) sector is at the heart of the New Economy and has been rapidly growing through the whole world during the last decades. This is also the case in Argentina where in the middle of a deep recession, the turnover of the sector augmented by 40 per cent and employment by 43 per cent between 1998 and 2000. The objective of this paper is to analyse the evolution, present situation and prospects for the Argentine SIS sector, relying on a detailed survey recently made to 100 firms operating in this developing country. Most of these firms are locally-owned and young SMEs supplying the domestic market but there are also a few large firms accounting for the lion’s share of that market. Exports are negligible in terms of the sector’s turnover. Argentina seems to have some advantages to exploit in order to make significant inroads in this sector: it has a relative abundance of high-skilled labour, a sizeable domestic market and a cultural influence in Spanish-speaking South America. SIS activities began in the 1970s and the sector has developed so far without any government support. None the less, SIS firms in Argentina have been basically tied to one particular segment of the domestic market—i.e., software for accountancy, management, etc.—where they enjoy advantages derived from the idiosyncratic feature of the domestic regulations and their knowledge about the business culture and the needs of their local clients. Firms experience problems in competing via costs, while, apart from some isolated exceptions, have never competed through innovation. Besides, they lack marketing capabilities as well as access to investment and working capital. Programming and analysis skills are available but they are relatively expensive in comparison to the situation in other developing and latecomer countries. Furthermore, management skills are imperfect. In turn, networking mechanisms are weak, both among SIS firms as well as with their customers, R&D institutions, etc. There is then a need both for action aimed at improving the SIS firms capabilities and endowments, as well as for intelligent public policies to foster this sector and dramatically increase its export capacity. The experiences of other developing and latecomer countries should help in finding ways to overcome the problems faced by this promising sector and significantly enhance its prospects

Science and technology policy and the National Innovation System in Argentina

Includes bibliographyThis article looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the policies proposed in the Argentine National Multi-year Science and Technology Plan, 1998-2000, within the conceptual framework of the approach taken by the National Innovation System (NIS);. In the light of a severe diagnosis of the weaknesses of Argentine efforts in this field, the new public policies are designed to promote the interaction of the many agents and institutions involved in those efforts, to change the rules governing the allocation of public resources to research, to promote strategic plans and evaluation mechanisms in public bodies in this field, and to induce greater voluntary spending by the private sector through fiscal credits for technological research and development and a programme of Technological Advisers, in order to give better attention to the demands of small and medium-sized enterprises. However, there are very profound and severe shortcomings in the ability of the Argentine financial system to provide finance for long-term investments in intangible assets, in the capacity of the educational system to link up with the needs of the production sector, and in the ability of the scientific institutions to interact with the educational system and the production sector. Although these shortcomings are mentioned in the Plan, they are not given the amount of attention needed to begin to reverse them. The long and frustrating past history of science and technology policies in the country, which have registered more failures than successes, and the partial success of the laissez-faire policy applied in the 1990s, which was considered to be a good policy by most of domestic and foreign big business, militate against the success of the initiatives under way. At the same time, and in spite of its stimulating suggestions, the approach taken by the NIS reflects serious ambiguities in its normative and conceptual aspects which limit its practical applicability

Biskyrmions Lattices in Centrosymmetric Magnetic Films

Abstract Theoretical framework is developed that explains biskyrmion lattices observed in non-chiral magnetic films. We study films of finite thickness containing up to $1000\times1000\times100$ spins. Hexatic biskyrmion lattices in a pure 2D exchange model are naturally described by the Weierstrass $\wp$ and $\zeta$ elliptic functions. Starting with such a lattice as an initial state we investigate how it evolves towards the minimum-energy state in the presence of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and dipole-dipole interaction. In accordance with experiments, we find that the final state is a triangular lattice of biskyrmion bubbles containing Bloch lines.Comment: 7 PR pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1906.0920