Knowledge Economy and Sociospatial Polarisation in Recife
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Thomas Bernhardt - 31. Mai, 12:11
Groups Recife: Knowledge Economy and Sociospatial Polarisation in Recife
Donnerstag, 31. Mai 2007
Montag, 21. Mai 2007
Knowledge Economy and Sociospatial Polarisation in Recife
1. Introduction
Here are the summary and abstract of two of the texts used as reference for the Knowledge Economy Group from Recife. Also, as a case study of the production sector of this new economy, the medical sector of Recife is analyzed.
2. References Reviewed
2.1. The Learning Economy and International Inequality – Chris Freeman
The very large gaps between rich and poor countries opened in the eighteenth century. Before that, there were certainly enclaves of wealth for small numbers of people (e. g. medieval Italy), but huge differences between large populations are contemporary. This international disparities is attributed to changes in technology provided by industrial revolution and to variations in the ‘social capability’ for catching up in technology and management of the economy.
The phenomenon of international inequality and related inequality within countries may best be understood by technical change and long cycles in economic growth. Thought Schumpeter did not study this, his theory of successive industrial revolutions offers a basis for interpretation of both phenomena.
In the 1980s and 1990s it seemed that both ethical concern and prudence had disappeared by worldwide reversing the progressive taxation that becomes after Second War. Even in communist countries, like China, this trend has also been strong. In the space of a decade brought by a combination of mass unemployment and big tax reductions for the rich – this was a major reversal of the social policies in the UK and as well in Europe since the 1940s to the 1970s. These ‘welfare state’ police was advocated by Keynes, Rathbone and Beveridge.
Like Kondratieff said, this long wave of industrial revolution has duration about fifty years. After studying the extraordinary rapid growth of the cotton iron, steam power, railways and electrification on the three industrial revolutions, Schumpeter observed that innovations tend to cluster together in new infrastructures, so that growth of economy depends on a succession of industrial revolutions.
Each big investment booms and full employment period were followed by prolonged recession, depression and high unemployment. For Schumpeter these recessions were result of the erosion of profits from the previous wave of technology and the necessity for a new infrastructure and new industries to unleash next wave.
Social inequality is not only a question of employment and unemployment. Each new wave oh technical change brings with it many social benefits in the form of new more skilled occupations and professions, and higher standards of living for many people based in the growth of new industries and services. But each wave also brings high social costs in form of erosion of old skills and occupations, etc. This uneven distribution of social costs and benefits occurs also on an international scale, with some nations taking full advantages of the new technologies than others.
In the 1980s real per capita incomes falling in Africa and Latin America, but were rising quite fast in South Asia and very rapidly in East Asia (expansion of exports of electronics and telecommunications equipment – the fastest growth sector in world trade). It was based on intensive skill and technology products. This was made possible by active education, industrial, and technology policies.
The process of catch-up developing countries in the post-war experience depends upon their technical capability and on imports of technologies. But without infrastructural investment in education, training, R&D, etc. very little can be assimilated of imported technologies. The Asian countries were by far the most active in promoting these policies.
The numbers of patents between 1977-82 and 1990-6 taken out in the USA by Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela doubled from 570 to 1,106, but in the same period the numbers taken out by the ‘four tigers’ increased 30 times over, from 671 to 18,763. Nevertheless of 1997-8’ East Asian financial crisis the miracle is not a mirage because no other group of countries in the world has produced more rapid economic growth and dramatic reductions in poverty.
Conclusions
Those economists and technologists who see in computer technology, information technology, and the Internet an enormous potential for new employment and a new wave of high investments and high growth ate not mistaken. But all previous experience shows that when a new pervasive technology enters the economic system, it can do so only after a prolonged social process of learning, reform, and adaptation of old institutions.
Both the increase and reductions in inequality within nations and the disparities between nations are related to the long waves of technical changes. But countries have different timings during structural adjustment if they are leading in technical innovations, associated with unemployment, skill changes, and organizational changes in the production system.
The reduction of inequality occurs where a new technology becomes dominant, full or near-full employment, new skills are widely diffused and socialized, and new movements for social reform have addressed the main sources of social conflict. Costs of diffusion and imitation, as well as original innovation, can be reduced once an autonomous capability has been established. So, the most favorable period for reduce inequalities is during the years of a dominant technological regime and more if that regime is becoming eroded in the leading countries. At this stage, finance capital search for new areas of investments and catch-up countries can provide one such opportunity.
2.2. Innovation Policy in the Globalizing Learning Economy – Bengt-Åke Lundvall
Lundvall highlights in the article main concepts to develop the innovation politics that are them: tacit knowledge, cooperation and networks. Beyond of those concepts the author has a concern with a politics of wider innovation observing in this case two important perspectives one is the distribution of income (social polarization) and the other is the environmental subject. The key concepts of this article, as they were already mentioned, they form a triad in which happening the development of the three the organizations, cities, regional and countries tended to a more vigorous development. The tacit knowledge, that it is won by the change of experience, it depends on coexistence among the individuals that it will generate a larger interaction among the several relationship landings. Like this that relationship will cause during the time a mutual cooperation for the several organizations that increased their competences. Finally the networks, that include as much the physical part as for human, would give the idea of an interlinked system in the which is denominated by Lundvall of "knowledge-intensive" networks that its gives the possibility to develop the several scales of analyses and like this to improve the regional disparities to find for the several places of the planet.
3. Recife Medical Pole – Value Chain, Challenges and Oportunities
Short summary of the text “Análise das Tendências Tecnológicas do Núcleo do Pólo Médico do Recife”, Chapter 7, written by Abraham Benzaquen Sicsú (2004). This is a report based on a research among the companies in the Recife Medical Pole.
3.1. General Characteristics
It is located at Ilha do Leite and gathers a significant number of services units and offer many medical and ancillary services.
There are hospitals and small and medium enterprises, using high technology based on the international market and distributors. The core of the pole is composed by hospitals, laboratories, diagnostics centers and health insurance administrators. The complementary activities are pharmaceutics industry and products, medicines and equipments, and information technology, among others. Its expansion wasn’t organized and its components are disarticulated, thus resulting in the lack of planned action, which generated an excess of services offered above the market demand for them.
Amount of city tax (ISS) collected by the companies in the pole (1999) R$ 9,3 million
Munber of employees 24 thousand
Direct Investment (from1998 to 2001) R$ 200 million
3.2. Pole’s Strategic VisionThe business strategies of the biggest hospitals and the health insurance companies are fundamental for the consolidation of the pole, since these hospitals are responsible for 95% of the income.
Nevertheless, these agents are not concerned with the collective efficiency of the Pole, but with their individual success. So their strategy focus in the cost and quality, instead of the technological changes that should happen in all the links of the chain.
3.3. Strategic Management of TechnologyThe components of the Center believe that the technologic changes are mainly due to the acquisition of new equipments, this fact shows their limited interest in the learning process to innovate and allows us to understand their dependence on the equipments suppliers.
Many of them don’t know the processes of development and commercialization of new products derived from scientific research.
Some aspects that could be explored by the participants of the Pole:
• Qualification of Human Resources
• Utilization of Technical Norms
• Substitution of Extra-Regional Imports
• Use of Information Technology as a Business Strategy
3.4. Recommendations
Considering the facts exposed, the author gives some recommendations, mainly:
• Public actions involving the reduction of taxes, the reduction of tariffs for imported goods, financing from official banks, improvement of infra-structure, and human resource formation
• Enterprise-University cooperation, and also Technical schools
• Fostering of an equipment production pole
• Building of an adequate environment for cooperation among the links of the production chain
• Certification of the Quality Management Systems
(Download this file here)Knowledge-Economy-and-Sociospatial-Polarisation-in-Recife (doc, 46 KB)
If you want to see the spatial displacement of the main hospitals, click here.Recife-Medical-Pole-Google-Earth-Images (ppt, 3,410 KB)
Here are the summary and abstract of two of the texts used as reference for the Knowledge Economy Group from Recife. Also, as a case study of the production sector of this new economy, the medical sector of Recife is analyzed.
2. References Reviewed
2.1. The Learning Economy and International Inequality – Chris Freeman
The very large gaps between rich and poor countries opened in the eighteenth century. Before that, there were certainly enclaves of wealth for small numbers of people (e. g. medieval Italy), but huge differences between large populations are contemporary. This international disparities is attributed to changes in technology provided by industrial revolution and to variations in the ‘social capability’ for catching up in technology and management of the economy.
The phenomenon of international inequality and related inequality within countries may best be understood by technical change and long cycles in economic growth. Thought Schumpeter did not study this, his theory of successive industrial revolutions offers a basis for interpretation of both phenomena.
In the 1980s and 1990s it seemed that both ethical concern and prudence had disappeared by worldwide reversing the progressive taxation that becomes after Second War. Even in communist countries, like China, this trend has also been strong. In the space of a decade brought by a combination of mass unemployment and big tax reductions for the rich – this was a major reversal of the social policies in the UK and as well in Europe since the 1940s to the 1970s. These ‘welfare state’ police was advocated by Keynes, Rathbone and Beveridge.
Like Kondratieff said, this long wave of industrial revolution has duration about fifty years. After studying the extraordinary rapid growth of the cotton iron, steam power, railways and electrification on the three industrial revolutions, Schumpeter observed that innovations tend to cluster together in new infrastructures, so that growth of economy depends on a succession of industrial revolutions.
Each big investment booms and full employment period were followed by prolonged recession, depression and high unemployment. For Schumpeter these recessions were result of the erosion of profits from the previous wave of technology and the necessity for a new infrastructure and new industries to unleash next wave.
Social inequality is not only a question of employment and unemployment. Each new wave oh technical change brings with it many social benefits in the form of new more skilled occupations and professions, and higher standards of living for many people based in the growth of new industries and services. But each wave also brings high social costs in form of erosion of old skills and occupations, etc. This uneven distribution of social costs and benefits occurs also on an international scale, with some nations taking full advantages of the new technologies than others.
In the 1980s real per capita incomes falling in Africa and Latin America, but were rising quite fast in South Asia and very rapidly in East Asia (expansion of exports of electronics and telecommunications equipment – the fastest growth sector in world trade). It was based on intensive skill and technology products. This was made possible by active education, industrial, and technology policies.
The process of catch-up developing countries in the post-war experience depends upon their technical capability and on imports of technologies. But without infrastructural investment in education, training, R&D, etc. very little can be assimilated of imported technologies. The Asian countries were by far the most active in promoting these policies.
The numbers of patents between 1977-82 and 1990-6 taken out in the USA by Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela doubled from 570 to 1,106, but in the same period the numbers taken out by the ‘four tigers’ increased 30 times over, from 671 to 18,763. Nevertheless of 1997-8’ East Asian financial crisis the miracle is not a mirage because no other group of countries in the world has produced more rapid economic growth and dramatic reductions in poverty.
Conclusions
Those economists and technologists who see in computer technology, information technology, and the Internet an enormous potential for new employment and a new wave of high investments and high growth ate not mistaken. But all previous experience shows that when a new pervasive technology enters the economic system, it can do so only after a prolonged social process of learning, reform, and adaptation of old institutions.
Both the increase and reductions in inequality within nations and the disparities between nations are related to the long waves of technical changes. But countries have different timings during structural adjustment if they are leading in technical innovations, associated with unemployment, skill changes, and organizational changes in the production system.
The reduction of inequality occurs where a new technology becomes dominant, full or near-full employment, new skills are widely diffused and socialized, and new movements for social reform have addressed the main sources of social conflict. Costs of diffusion and imitation, as well as original innovation, can be reduced once an autonomous capability has been established. So, the most favorable period for reduce inequalities is during the years of a dominant technological regime and more if that regime is becoming eroded in the leading countries. At this stage, finance capital search for new areas of investments and catch-up countries can provide one such opportunity.
2.2. Innovation Policy in the Globalizing Learning Economy – Bengt-Åke Lundvall
Lundvall highlights in the article main concepts to develop the innovation politics that are them: tacit knowledge, cooperation and networks. Beyond of those concepts the author has a concern with a politics of wider innovation observing in this case two important perspectives one is the distribution of income (social polarization) and the other is the environmental subject. The key concepts of this article, as they were already mentioned, they form a triad in which happening the development of the three the organizations, cities, regional and countries tended to a more vigorous development. The tacit knowledge, that it is won by the change of experience, it depends on coexistence among the individuals that it will generate a larger interaction among the several relationship landings. Like this that relationship will cause during the time a mutual cooperation for the several organizations that increased their competences. Finally the networks, that include as much the physical part as for human, would give the idea of an interlinked system in the which is denominated by Lundvall of "knowledge-intensive" networks that its gives the possibility to develop the several scales of analyses and like this to improve the regional disparities to find for the several places of the planet.
3. Recife Medical Pole – Value Chain, Challenges and Oportunities
Short summary of the text “Análise das Tendências Tecnológicas do Núcleo do Pólo Médico do Recife”, Chapter 7, written by Abraham Benzaquen Sicsú (2004). This is a report based on a research among the companies in the Recife Medical Pole.
3.1. General Characteristics
It is located at Ilha do Leite and gathers a significant number of services units and offer many medical and ancillary services.
There are hospitals and small and medium enterprises, using high technology based on the international market and distributors. The core of the pole is composed by hospitals, laboratories, diagnostics centers and health insurance administrators. The complementary activities are pharmaceutics industry and products, medicines and equipments, and information technology, among others. Its expansion wasn’t organized and its components are disarticulated, thus resulting in the lack of planned action, which generated an excess of services offered above the market demand for them.
Amount of city tax (ISS) collected by the companies in the pole (1999) R$ 9,3 million
Munber of employees 24 thousand
Direct Investment (from1998 to 2001) R$ 200 million
3.2. Pole’s Strategic VisionThe business strategies of the biggest hospitals and the health insurance companies are fundamental for the consolidation of the pole, since these hospitals are responsible for 95% of the income.
Nevertheless, these agents are not concerned with the collective efficiency of the Pole, but with their individual success. So their strategy focus in the cost and quality, instead of the technological changes that should happen in all the links of the chain.
3.3. Strategic Management of TechnologyThe components of the Center believe that the technologic changes are mainly due to the acquisition of new equipments, this fact shows their limited interest in the learning process to innovate and allows us to understand their dependence on the equipments suppliers.
Many of them don’t know the processes of development and commercialization of new products derived from scientific research.
Some aspects that could be explored by the participants of the Pole:
• Qualification of Human Resources
• Utilization of Technical Norms
• Substitution of Extra-Regional Imports
• Use of Information Technology as a Business Strategy
3.4. Recommendations
Considering the facts exposed, the author gives some recommendations, mainly:
• Public actions involving the reduction of taxes, the reduction of tariffs for imported goods, financing from official banks, improvement of infra-structure, and human resource formation
• Enterprise-University cooperation, and also Technical schools
• Fostering of an equipment production pole
• Building of an adequate environment for cooperation among the links of the production chain
• Certification of the Quality Management Systems
(Download this file here)Knowledge-Economy-and-Sociospatial-Polarisation-in-Recife (doc, 46 KB)
If you want to see the spatial displacement of the main hospitals, click here.Recife-Medical-Pole-Google-Earth-Images (ppt, 3,410 KB)
avaz00 - 21. Mai, 21:12
Proposal for the article - Group Sociospacial Polarisation in Recife
The proposal for the article is based on the discussions carried out in the seminar “Knowledge Economy and Socioespacial Polarisation in Recife and Vienna”, carried out in the first semester of 2007 simultaneously in programs of post-graduation of Recife (Profa. Ana Cristina Fernandes) and Vienna (Prof. Andreas Novy).
Our group is responsible for searching the subject of sociospacial polarisation in Recife, aiming at defining this polarisation and relating it to the process of Development. The results will be presented as article.
The main materials used until the moment to guide the discussions had been the ATLASES Of the HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Of RECIFE and the article synthesis of the DEMOLOGOS - Development Models and Logics in Socioeconomic Organization in Space, intitled DEVELOPMENT. The Atlases (through texts, graphs, pictures and tables) display in detail the enormous inequality within the city of Recife, denoting the picture of socioespacial polarisation. The work of the DEMOLOGOS, in turn, supplies analyses of methodological and theoretical character, capable to guide disucssions on the subject development in general and on knowledge society specifically.
Thus, we propose the following structure for the article:
Introduction
1) We will argue the main concepts (sociospacial polarisation and development).
2) We will analyse the sociospa polarisation in Recife, emphasizing its peculiarities.
3) We will argue the impacts of the polarisation on the development process.
4) We will reflect on the development as a Concrete Utopia.
5) Conclusions.
By Felippe Maciel, Geane e Priscila Batista
Até logo!!!!!
Our group is responsible for searching the subject of sociospacial polarisation in Recife, aiming at defining this polarisation and relating it to the process of Development. The results will be presented as article.
The main materials used until the moment to guide the discussions had been the ATLASES Of the HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Of RECIFE and the article synthesis of the DEMOLOGOS - Development Models and Logics in Socioeconomic Organization in Space, intitled DEVELOPMENT. The Atlases (through texts, graphs, pictures and tables) display in detail the enormous inequality within the city of Recife, denoting the picture of socioespacial polarisation. The work of the DEMOLOGOS, in turn, supplies analyses of methodological and theoretical character, capable to guide disucssions on the subject development in general and on knowledge society specifically.
Thus, we propose the following structure for the article:
Introduction
1) We will argue the main concepts (sociospacial polarisation and development).
2) We will analyse the sociospa polarisation in Recife, emphasizing its peculiarities.
3) We will argue the impacts of the polarisation on the development process.
4) We will reflect on the development as a Concrete Utopia.
5) Conclusions.
By Felippe Maciel, Geane e Priscila Batista
Até logo!!!!!
priscilabv - 21. Mai, 20:52
