ABSTRACT

Sachs and Warner (1997) have collected econometric evidence for the thesis of a natural resource curse, in which natural resource-specialized economies show lower rates of growth than the world’s average. Some scholars have held that “impediments to technological adoption and to innovation arising from weak national ‘learning’ capacity, as well as the perverse incentives of the protectionist era” are the main channels for the curse (Maloney, 2007). Wright and Czelusta (2007) advocate for the centrality of the role played by innovative networks in the development of important natural resource-intensive nations, such as the United States, Norway and Australia. The building of innovation networks is in the root of a nation’s capacity to capture knowledge and innovative externalities that deliver free lunches offered by technical progress. A similar thesis has been put forward by Perez (2008), which argues that learning and capability accumulation may be driven from natural resource industries in Latin America. Her arguments are based on the fact that these industries represent opportunities for local production of components of the global corporations’ production chain and for the establishment of technological networks where knowledge would be embedded.