Besides the current introduction this study presents other t

Besides the current introduction, this brompheniramine maleate study presents other three sections in order to investigate the technological and competitive heterogeneity of the MT industry in Brazil. Section 2 gives a brief summary of the MT trajectory and its competitive conditions, technological capabilities and expertise of the MT industry up to the 1980s. This section seeks to highlight the productive features and technological efforts that determine manufacturers’ development and expertise, including MT production with computerized numerical control (MT/CNC). It also aims at pinpointing the innovative, competitive and institutional environment configured by ISI policies regarding the development and heterogeneity that characterize the capital goods industry and the Brazilian industry. Section 3 presents a summary of the industrial restructuring process and explains the reasons for the technological heterogeneity within the MT industry from its productive specialization, technological dynamics and user’s structure and sophistication. Section 4 presents the final considerations.
The technological trajectory and learning by the machine tool industry in Brazil During the ISI period, Brazil had an ambiguous and contradictory policy with respect to the capital goods industry. On one hand, as for the market reserve, the importation of machinery and equipment with similar national product was forbidden. It was done by applying strong non-tariff (National Similar Product Law) and tariff barriers linked to the importation of such goods. On the other hand, such prohibition facilitated the importation of capital goods with no similar national product by applying tax benefits and foreign exchange benefits aimed at the modernization of the industrial park (Erber and Vermulm, 1993; Nassif, 2007). As a result, the industry has focused on producing capital goods with low technological content when compared with the imported ones. Similarly, according to this regulatory framework, on the one side, the entry of foreign companies in several industrial sectors (durable and capital consumer goods) was encouraged and, on the other, there was the induced entry of small and medium-sized companies. Such companies had excessive verticalization and low economies of scale, which was associated with production fragmentation and high diversification within the capital goods industry. It resulted in the spreading of investments and in the horizontal expansion of sectors holding an excessive number of producers. These results would hinder the efficiency and the incorporation of new technologies. However, “these are not criticisms to the strategy itself, but to its conduct because, in general, the Brazilian import substitution industrialization led to a highly dynamic Brazilian economy for decades” (Carneiro, 2002, p. 312). Although there is evidence of a machinery and equipment industry in Brazil since the late nineteenth century (Marson, 2012), the ISI acceleration during the 1930s created favorable conditions to the growth of a capital goods Brazilian industry and, especially, to the genesis of a MT industry. Initially, the incentives to MT production were driven by demand and needs from the electro-metal-mechanical sectors regarding repair, maintenance and the manufacturing of products, which require little complexity during production, in the consumer non-durable, consumer durable and capital goods areas (including the new MT industry), as well as by the stagnation of the Brazilian industry productive capacity. The prohibition and the precarious importation possibilities induced the emergence of production bottlenecks that generated the need to technically improve the capital goods production, such as in the case of conventional lathes produced by companies founded by the first-generation of immigrants who have developed their products by copying and adapting foreign technology using reverse engineering (Versiani and Bastos, 1982, p. 14).