Natural Resource Industries, ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ and the Case of Chilean Salmon Farming

Chilean salmon farming has been considered as an outstanding example of success after growing at double digit rates for more than twenty years. While the expansion was indeed dramatic, it came at the expense of severe sanitary and environmental deterioration. The outbreak in 2008 of the infectious salmon anaemia, a viral disease that kills salmon, but does not affect humans, has made this utterly clear. The overexploitation of the ‘commons’ upon which the industry has grown and the lack of an adequate regulatory mechanism to monitor adverse environmental effects contributed to this disaster, which now threatens the future of the industry and the country benefiting from its natural comparative advantage for salmon farming. The paper shows that activities based on the exploitation of a common pool resource require quite a different analytical approach than the one conventional neoclassical theory offers us for the understanding of firm and industry behaviour. This study shows that industries of this sort enjoy unique location-specific conditions requiring specific know how, R&D, and strong public-private cooperation in order to attain environmentally sustainable long term growth.- Chilean salmon farming, common pool resources, natural resource based industry, ‘tragedy of the commons’

Institutional Requirements for Market-led Development in Latin America

This paper seeks to provide a systematized framework for the main ideas that have been developed by ECLAC concerning the effects that market-led reforms have had on labour, financial and technology markets. In order to explore these questions further, a research project has been undertaken by ECLAC with the sponsorship of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ). The project deals with the institutional requirements for properly functioning financial, technology and labour markets. Particular attention is being devoted to the institutional forces affecting market access by traditionally excluded actors, such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the case of long-term financial and technology markets, poor households in the case of housing finance, and female workers in the case of the labour market. As a consequence of the market-led reforms, Latin America has transformed its pattern of development and the way in which its brand of capitalism is configured. At the same time, the reform process is shown to have yielded unsatisfactory results when the performance level achieved in each factor market is evaluated. Labour markets exhibit a range of difficulties in reducing unemployment and informal employment. Financial markets are characterized by concentration and by the increasing difficulties encountered by the weaker agents in accessing resources. And, in most of the economies in the region, the role played by technology markets in creating and diffusing technology domestically is being downgraded. This poor performance has co-evolved along with a reduction in the State’s participation in the economy and an increasing power asymmetry in favour of private agents. The above difficulties seem to be related to the persistence of various types of market failures and the lack of non-market institutions capable of strengthening and supporting the operation of factor markets. The persistence of imperfect information, the lack of initial entitlements and gaps in learning capabilities have hindered the adaptation of various actors to the discipline of a new macro policy and incentive regime. Because of these underlying weaknesses in the institutional fabric inherited by the region, its factor markets have functioned very imperfectly and have failed to deliver what was expected of them in terms of a better long-term overall performance.Institutions; Development; Latin America

Innovation and Foreign Investment Behavior of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper deals with the links between the development of new drugs, and particularly of innovative new drugs, and the international activities of U.S. drug companies. While U.S. drug companies have developed new production processes - the most notable being the fermentation process for making penicillin - we concentrate in this paper on new products. Since production costs comprise less than 40 percent of the selling price of drugs and since the person choosing the drug rarely pays for it, growth in company sales and profits comes more from introducing new products than from cutting costs and prices of old products. The main novelty of our study is our examination of "innovative" as contrasted with "imitative" new drugs. Previous studies have generally focused on the total number of new drugs produced each year, but since our interest is in the causes and consequences of innovation, we have concentrated on the products we have rated as innovative. Section I explains our criteria for this distinction and presents our enumeration of the innovative new drugs for each of the 22 companies in our sample. In Section II we discuss trends in the rate of drug innovation and the factors influencing those trends. Section III describes our sample of drug companies and characterizes them with respect to their size, research investment, and innovativeness. Section IV examines the relation of innovativeness to the foreign activities of individual firms. In Section V we analyze, for a sample of 7 new drugs introduced by two companies, the rate at which use of the drugs was diffused among various countries arid the impact of the presence of manufacturing plants on the rate of diffusion.

CAMBIOS ESTRUCTURALES Y DESARROLLO ECONÓMICO

The paper examines analytical aspects of the link between structural change and the process of economic development, showing empirical evidence available in different countries of Latin America. The author analyses how the relative weight of different industrial branches changed to the interior of the industrial product of several Latin American countries, and, at the same time, presents two case studies that show the sector-specific character of the referred process. The paper concludes by analyzing public policies prone to favor both the entry of new firms with higher technological intensity and the insertion of new, knowledge-intensive, productive activities bent towards exports, in the pursuit of closing the income and productivity gap with the developed world.El trabajo examina aspectos analíticos del vínculo entre cambio estructural y el proceso de desarrollo, exhibiendo evidencia empírica disponible en diversos países de la región. El autor examina cómo fue cambiando el peso relativo de las distintas ramas de la industria al interior del producto manufacturero de diversos países Latinoamericanos, a la vez que analiza dos estudios de caso que muestran el carácter ‘sectorespecifico’ del proceso a que hace referencia. El trabajo concluye con un análisis relativo a las políticas públicas tendientes a favorecer tanto la entrada de nuevas firmas de mayor intensidad tecnológica, como la inserción de nuevas actividades productivas conocimiento- intensivas y volcadas a la exportación, en pos de cerrar gradualmente la brecha de ingresos y productividad con el mundo desarrollado.&nbsp

Creación de tecnología en el sector manufacturero argentino

Incluye Bibliografí

Domestic technology generation in LDCs: a review of research findings

Includes bibliograph

Cambio tecnológico en la industria metalmecánica latinoamericana: resultados de un programa de estudios de casos

Incluye BibliografíaPresenta los principales resultados de un Programa de Investigaciones en el campo de la produccion metalmecanica latinoamericana, el cual constituye un intento de cubrir la carencia de informacion basica acerca de la realidad metalmecanica de la region. Examina en detalle la conducta economica y tecnologica de numerosas firmas metalmecanicas radicadas en Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru y Venezuela. Incursiona, a titulo preliminar, en los grandes temas de politica economica y tecnologica a que remiten dichos resultados