Determinants of Technology and Innovation Activities in Argentina: Evidence from a firm level survey

The Argentine economy has gone through important reforms during the nineties. Many of these reforms aimed at integrating the domestic economy with world trade and investment flows. There is a vast theoretical literature that links trade and investment liberalization with technological progress (Young (1991)), Grossman and Helpman, 1991)). There are some studies that have tried to investigate this relationship at the firm level for developed countries (Cohen and Levinthal (1990) Griffith et al (2003)). Still there are very few studies that have attempted to do this analysis for developing countries. The purpose of this study is to partially fill this gap in the literature looking at the magnitude and determinants of R&D and innovation activities (IA) made by Argentine firms. In particular, we use recent data collected by CEPAL to undertake micro-econometric analysis of the determinants of IA efforts at the firm level. In particular, we try to isolate the impact of the Argentine National System of Innovation, the trade regime and local market conditions.