ABSTRACT
The 1990s represented a crucial decade in EU and Latin American integration processes. In the technological scenario, Transnational Corporations increased their extra-frontier technological efforts and brought up new organizational modes to manage internationalized R&D. At the same time, countries changed their National Technological Specialization (NTS) patterns. Given the importance of technical progress on the long-term rate of growth, literature has been developing several theoretical and empirical works on the determinants of NTS and on its persistent versus dynamic character. NTS distributions are neither random nor indifferent to long-term growth and can be strong determinants of long-term growth and explain the persistence of development and technological gaps over time (Montobbio and Rampa, 2005).
