Transformations in international productive structure and impacts on Brazilian industry: an analysis from technological perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the transformations of the Brazilian industry in perspective compared to Germany, China, the United States, Japan and Mexico, with emphasis on the technological dimension. It is argued that such transformations should be understood as deriving from the phenomenon of global production networks and increasing production displacement for Asian countries with low production cost. It is also admitted that the process has conditioned the possibilities of industrial development of the countries, including Brazil. As main results, it was observed that China began to industrialize by receiving stages of the global manufacturing process, fragmented in global production networks. Industrialized countries such as Germany, Japan and the USA have gone through a process of deindustrialization in the recent period, defined by specialized literature as normal. In the same sense, Brazil and Mexico go through a process of deindustrialization understood in the literature as precocious, since they did not reach a considerable degree of development. This paper concluded that in the Brazilian case, there is technological backwardness, especially in sectors typical of the microelectronic paradigm, in addition to observing an increase in the productivity gap that has led the Brazilian economy to a falling behind path.