Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

I ask you to recognize that both the term I used above-coevolutionandthe emphasis of how technological advance interacts with institutionsand institutional change, signal a perspective on what drives economicgrowth that is very different from that contained in neoclassicalgrowth theory, new or old. It may be useful, therefore, if I begin byexplaining the difference in viewpoint.I. The Evolution of Technologyas the Key Driving Force Behind Economic GrowthIt is fair to say that modern neoclassical growth theory was bornout of a set of empirical and theoretical studies done during the 1950sand 1960s. The theory involved was basically that employed to analyzefirm and industry behavior and performance, and in that use wasa very static theory, focussed on conditions of industry equilibrium. Acentral concept of that theory was that of the «production function»which laid out the range of different ways of producing a given outputthat prevailing technology permitted; in particular it was presumedthat there was considerable flexibility regarding the capital intensity ofproduction that a firm manager might choose to employ, as a functionof the costs of labor and machinery. To deal with economic growth,that theory was «dynamized» and augmented to incorporate increasesover time in the capital intensity of production associated with risingwage rates which induced «movements along the production function»,and to admit technological advance, treated as an upward shift in theproduction function. But the core assumption that the economic systemalways was in equilibrium was preserved.The augmented theory could, in principle, be used to decomposeeconomic growth into a part that could be attributed to movementsalong a given production function, in particular growth of output perworker due to increases in capital intensity, and a part that needed tobe attributed to technological advance. In empirical work this apparatuswas used to analyze the new National Product statistics that, forthe first time, gave economists a way to measure economic growth.Debates2 6 6Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial