Innovation and Productivity: Evidence from Six Latin American Countries

By G. Crespi, Pluvia Zúñiga. 2010

558 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines the determinants of technological innovation and its impact on firm labor productivity across six Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay) using micro data from innovation surveys. In line with the literature, in all countries firms that invest in knowledge are more able to introduce new technological advances, and those that innovate have greater labor productivity than those that do not. Yet firm-level determinants of innovation investment are much more heterogeneous than in OECD countries. Cooperation, foreign ownership, and exporting increase the propensity to invest in innovation activities and encourage innovation investment in only half of the countries studied. Scientific and market sources of information have little or no impact on firm innovation efforts, which illustrates the weak linkages that characterize national innovation systems in those countries. The results in terms of productivity, however, highlight the importance of innovation in enabling firms to improve economic performance and catch up.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

Innovation and productivity in formal and informal firms in Ghana (2017, unknown): “However, as argued by various scholars (Bloom et al., 2013; Bruhn et al., 2010; Crespi and Zuniga, 2012; Mano et al., 2012) in the current state of development of LICs it is important to recognize the impact of a range of innovations, including management and marketing innovations, the impact of…”
Innovation, Employment and Skills in Advanced and Developing Countries: A Survey of the Literature (2011, background): “…in R&D, a variable which is not correlated with the error term (see also Piva and Vivarelli, 2009) 15 That is why in many empirical studies on DCs the assumed explanatory variable for innovation is the total innovative expenditure rather than simply R&D (see for example Crespi and Zuniga, 2010).”
Appropriability mechanisms, innovation, and productivity: evidence from the UK (2014, unknown): “The first variable captures the notion that exporting firms may be more willing to invest in R&D (or any other innovation spending) as the competition and the learning effect of exporting should enhance its innovative effort (Crespi and Zuniga 2012).”
The Risks of Innovation: Are Innovating Firms Less Likely to Die? (2012, unknown): “This method was applied to Chile by Crespi and Zuniga (2012) using perception-based innovation measures for a cross-section of plants in the Chilean Innovation Survey.”
Institutional Voids or Organizational Resilience? Business Groups, Innovation, and Market Development in Latin America (2015, background): “The study of the innovative activities of business groups is particularly important in the context of emerging economies (Carney, Gedajlovic, Heugens, Van Essen, & Van Oosterhout, 2011; Crespi & Zuniga, 2012).”