Reform and Redesign: A Review of the Changing Role of the Public Purposes in R&D and Technology Institutes (Working Paper 17)

As the globalization of knowledge has taken hold over the past decade, and as governments around the world review their new roles in support of the production of knowledge, several factors have shaped the context in governments’ approach to public research. Arguably, none has been more affected by these pressures for reform than government scientific and technology laboratories or institutes. Often ignored in the re-shaping of national systems of innovation, these organizations play an important role in advancing national economic and social objectives. This paper, by reviewing examples of reforms underway in several countries, including Canada, France, Germany, the UK, Japan, USA and Latin America, will argue that government research and technology institutes — often historically surrogates for industrial research — are gradually re-defining their mandates to meet the new pressures of globalization as well as satisfying growing public demands for increased relevance and efficiency in responding to citizens’ and industry needs.

The political economy of industrial policy in Peru and Ecuador: 1980-2010

This dissertation focuses on industrial policy in two developing countries: Peru and Ecuador. Informed by comparative historical analysis, it explains how the Import-Substitution Industrialization policies promoted during the 1970s by military administration unravelled in the following 30 years under the guidance of Washington Consensus policies. Positioning political economy in time, the research objectives were two-fold: understanding long-term policy reform patterns, including the variables that conditioned cyclical versus path-dependent dynamics of change and; secondly, investigating the direction and leverage of state institutions supporting the manufacturing sector at the dawn, peak and consolidation of neoliberal discourse in both countries. Three interconnected causal mechanisms explain the divergence of trajectories: institutional legacies, coordination among actors and economic distribution of power. Peru’s long tradition of a minimal state contrasts with the embedded character of Ecuador long tradition of legal protectionism dating back to the Liberal Revolution. Peru’s close policy coordination among stakeholders –state technocrats and business elites- differs from Ecuador’s “winners-take-all” approach for policy-making. Peru’s economic dynamism concentrated in Lima sharply departs from Ecuador’s competitive regional economic leaderships. This dissertation paid particular attention to methodology to understand the intersection between structure and agency in policy change. Tracing primary and secondary sources, as well as key pieces of legislation, became critical to understand key turning points and long-term patterns of change. Open-ended interviews (N=58) with two stakeholder groups (business elites and bureaucrats) compounded the effort to knit motives, discourses, and interests behind this long transition. In order to understand this amount of data, this research build an index of policy intervention as a methodological contribution to assess long patterns of policy change. These findings contribute to the current literature on State-market relations and varieties of capitalism, institutional change, and policy reform.