ABSTRACT
What Is To Be Explained? The previous chapters have provided a narrative history of the Brazilian informatics policy and its dynamic institutional framework, and, from this empirical description, a “map” of the topography of the autonomy of the state in the “region” of informatics has been sketched for three distinct periods. Taken together, they show the trajectory of the autonomy of the state over time. This chapter analyzes competing descriptions and explanations of that trajectory. It is not only the trajectory of state autonomy, however, that is controversial. The basic description of the policy itself and its consequences as documented in this study also diverges from other available accounts which tend to either exaggerate the successes or the failures of the policy. Emanuel Adler, for example, tended to describe the evolution of the policy as a single, smooth process of the ever more successful consolidation of the model implanted during the CAPRE period. As late as 1988, he described the policy as “transforming technological dependence” by forming “domestic manufacturing capacity in computers as well as the ability to adapt foreign technology and to innovate,” citing somewhat misleading statistics about the impressive proportions of nationally produced installed computers.1 Albert Hirschman offered an even less critical assessment, claiming that “the Brazilian industry appears to have done well, especially in the microcomputer field,” where technical innovation was, in fact, quite modest and economies of scale were severely compromised by the fragmentation of the Brazilian market among more than 100 producers. Hirschman even compared Brazil favorably to “the leading producer countries” in its capacity to generate “rapid growth and falling costs,” “endogenous innovation capacity,” and “an important source of employment.”2 The results were impressive compared to the situation in almost all of the rest of the Third World, but Brazil was always very far from “transforming technological dependence” in the sense of becoming an autonomous producer of new technology in any way comparable to “the leading producer countries.” Brazil was not on the verge of becoming a Latin Japan. A more interesting and reasonable comparison, which began to occur to Brazilians as early as 1986, was that between the successes and limitations of South Korea’s more export-oriented informatics strategy and Brazil’s more inward-looking policy.3
