Technical Change and Technology Policy: The Case of Numerically Controlled Lathes in Argentina

This paper addresses the question: Under what conditions will the recent rapid technical change in products in the machine tool sector increase the technological gap between the developed countries and the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs)? The technical change referred to is the trend towards the substitution of standard machine tools by Numerically Controlled (NC) machine tools. The specific task will be to analyze the conditions under which the leading Argentinian lathe producer will be able to move from the design and production of standard lathes to numerically controlled lathes.