2.10 Embalaje de transporte
2.10.4 Consideraciones del embalaje retornable
Building on the tradition of classical economists, Nicholas Kaldor was among the first to understand that countries’ industrial performance is primarily determined by differences in technological capabilities when he claims that “in a growing world economy the growth of exports is mainly to be explained by the income elasticity of foreign countries for a country’s products; but it is a matter of the innovative ability and adaptive capacity of its manufactures whether this income elasticity will tend to be relatively large or small”(Kaldor, 1981:603). Similarly, for Sanjaya Lall, the main architect of the UNIDO IDR 2002/3 and of the first CIP index, “Competitiveness depends on many things. One vital determinant – ultimately perhaps the most important single determinant – is the skills of the workforce at all levels.”(Lall, 2001a:128;
see also Lall, 1992; Fagerberg, 1988, 1996; Best, 1990).
Since the early 1970s, a growing number of empirical studies, mainly carried out in large-scale Latin American and Asian industries, have shown that technology is a complex bundle of knowledge which can be embodied not only in machinery, but also in people, organizational arrangements, routines and proce-dures22. These ‘vectors of technology’ are strictly interconnected and a basic improvement in one of them may therefore result in or require a major transformation of other vectors. For this reason, the very simple introduction of new machinery through technological diffusion always requires a creative process of prob-lem-solving and adaptation-reconfiguration of the production process which, in turn, may lead to tech-nological innovation. Although these studies initially focused on the technical aspects of techtech-nological capabilities, the organizational dimensions of learning and capability building entered the scene, leading to the development of a comprehensive and often articulated strand of literature called technological capa-bilities literature.
According to the technological capabilities perspective, the industrial competitiveness of any economic system crucially depends on a two-step learning process: industrial skills development through formal education/training and capabilities building through in-firm productive experiences. At the firm level,
22 See Katz, 1987 and Lall, 1987. Until the late 1960s, “technology was identified almost exclusively with machinery (capital goods). Technological change was therefore seen either as development of new kinds of machinery (technological “innovation”) or as acquisition of installation of new machinery which had already been developed elsewhere (the “diffusion” of technology)” (Bell and Albu, 1999:1716).
becoming efficient involves a vital learning process. As stressed in evolutionary economics, this process is collective, cumulative, uncertain and technology specific in nature; also, learning and production dynamics in firms are affected by externalities, problems of coordination in time and scale, accumulation of factors in concrete forms and agglomeration biases (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Dosi, 1988; Andreoni, 2013).
On the contrary, more orthodox approaches not only assume perfect factor mobility but, more importantly, rely on the idea that using technologies (machines, equipment, blueprints) does not imply any ‘real’ learn-ing effort and that countries actually have the same abilities to master technologies. Even when learnlearn-ing appears as an explanatory variable in the new trade theory, it is treated as a form of predetermined (and passive) economies of scale over time. Thus, ultimately, there is no space for learning and production capabilities in these approaches.
Martin Bell and Keith Pavitt provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for the analysis of technological capabilities(Bell and Pavitt, 1993, 1995). In their work, technological capabilities are defined as the resources needed to generate and manage technological change (including skills, knowledge and experience and organizational systems). Specifically, technological capabilities refer to a firm’s ability to undertake in-house improvements across different technological functions such as process and production organiza-tion, products, equipment and investments. These technological capabilities “needed to generate and man-age technical change” very often “differ substantially from those needed to operate existing technical systems”. The latter, that is, the “resources used to produce industrial goods at a given level of efficiency and given input combinations” refer to what Bell and Pavitt call production capabilities(Bell and Pavitt, 1995:78).
In Sanjaya Lall’s matrix of technological and organizational capabilities, as reported in Table 6, firm-level capabilities are categorized by technical functions (investment, production, technology and marketing) and are accumulated through the capacity of performing more and more complex activities (from simple routine to adaptive duplicative activities, up to innovative, risky activities).
Table 6: Technological and organizational capabilities within firms
Source: UNIDO, 2002:96-97.
The accumulation and development of technological and organizational capabilities is not only the outcome of a given firm’s intended investment, but is also affected by a series of factors that are external to the firm. The development of capabilities at the firm level is affected by the presence of capabilities at the meso- and macro-levels. In fact, the discovery, acquisition, adaptation and re-configuration of technologies is based on a continuous collective learning process which takes place intra-firm but, more crucially, inter-firm and within industrial clusters. This is nothing more than the meso- and macro-institutional framework into which firms are embedded and into which different agents such as public and private research insti-tutes, universities, vocational-technical schools, technology information and productivity centres, technology extension agencies and industrial services providers, just to mention a few, produce, exchange and use knowledge (O’Sullivan, 2011).
Box 1: Institutional support to technological efforts of firms
Table 7: Institutional support to technological efforts of firms
Source: UNIDO, 2002:118.
In order to capture the intrinsic collective nature of learning dynamics, Sanjaya Lall refers to the existence of national technological capabilities that arise from an interplay between capabilities, incentives and institu-tions. Embracing the OECD’s three-pronged approach, Lall (1992:170) stresses how “[o]ver the longer term, economic growth arises from the interplay of incentives and capabilities. The capabilities define the best that can be achieved; while the incentives guide the use of the capabilities and, indeed stimulate their expansion, renewal or disappearance. Both incentives and capabilities operate within an institutional frame-work: institutions set rules of the game, as well as directly intervening in the play; they act to alter capabilities and change incentives; and they can modify behaviour by changing attitudes and expectations.”
Thus, production and technological capabilities building at the firm level is affected by the broader ‘national learning system’, in particular by three interlocking sets of factors constituting what Lall calls the “triangle of competitiveness” (Lall, 2001a:20).
• incentives (macroeconomic environment, trade policy, domestic industrial policies and domestic demand);
• factor markets (technical skills, finance and access to information);
• institutions (supporting education and training, standards, metrology, technical extension, R&D, long-term credit, etc.).
From the perspective of technological capabilities building, industrial clusters acquire a greater importance as ‘knowledge systems’ more so than ‘production systems’. In other words, they are more crucial in a dynamic rather than static sense. Industrial clusters have generally been described and classified (horizontal vs vertical) on the basis of ‘the materials they use and the goods they produce, [but] it is knowledge stocks within firms and knowledge flows to them, between them and within them which underlie change in the types of goods they produce and the methods they use to produce them’(Bell and Albu, 1999:1722). At the firm level, technological dynamism can only be achieved if the cluster is a knowledge system. For this reason, the internal characteristics of the cluster as a network for knowledge exchange and accumulation are crucial, although strongly context and technology dependent. At the cluster level, the acquisition of new knowledge is affected by the degree of openness of the cluster: the more the cluster is closed, the more it is destined to lock-in, for cognitive inbreeding or entropic death.
However, openness to ‘global knowledge’ can be realized on the basis of different institutional and organi-zational arrangements such as, for example, through different kinds of ‘gatekeepers’, namely public insti-tutes, the private association of firms or private-public partnerships that arise from the local cluster (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 2007; O’Sullivan 2011). Thus, the relationship between local industrial clusters and global value chains can be structured into different institutional frameworks and regulated on the basis of different corporate governance models. Being linked to global value chains represents a learning opportunity that enterprises in developing countries can exploit to upgrade their capabilities (Pietrobelli and Rabellotti, 2011).