Investimento Direto Estrangeiro e a Política Industrial: um estudo dos efeitos de transbordamentos em países da América Latina

Abstract

During the last decades, Latin American countries have established various policies seeking to promote the opening of their domestic markets protected by international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). Since then, FDI attraction policies have become a priority of the political agenda in these countries, especially due to the belief that it sets up as a potential source of creating new jobs and capital injection in the domestic economy, which is usually accompanied by new technologies and innovations. The first objective of this research was to analyze the effects of historical events that identify different configurations and intensities of state intervention through industrial policy on internal structural conditions and international insertion of Latin American countries. For this, integrated, auto-regressive and moving averages (ARIMA) and intervention models for the period 1966-2014 were adjusted. The results indicate that the interventions, in most cases, did not significantly alter the behavior of the analyzed series, except for economic growth series. In addition to these cases, the interventions were quite punctual, so that no pattern of behavior could be verified for the sample of surveyed countries in terms of temporary changes in behavior of the time series due to the three analyzed interventions periods. The second objective of this research was to identify the effects of productivity spillovers of FDI and state interventions through industrial policy in Latin American countries. The total factor productivity is decomposed into technical change and technological change. The analyzes were performed using a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis technique and the adjustment of the econometric model was done using the Generalized Method of Moments for a panel data from Latin American countries in the period 1994-2014. The results show that FDI has contributed to the catch-up effect and for the frontier shift. However, the results confirm the hypothesis that FDI benefits depend on the absorption capacity of the EPLs in the host economies. The third objective of this research was to identify the regional aspects that can promote the effects of innovation spillovers for the Brazilian federation units. The econometric analyzes of ten Brazilian federation units arranged in a panel of data in the period 2001-2011 were developed based on the Generalized Method of Moments. Evidences show that agglomeration economies are important factors in determining the innovation capacity of Brazilian federation units and that participating in cooperation networks does not guarantee improvements in innovation capacity.