Technological development by multinational companies in Brazil and South Korea

The present article compares the technological performance of US enterprises in Brazil and South Korea. This analysis is based on the differences between the industrialization models adopted in those countries. While in Brazil industrialization was based on the attraction of multinational companies, South Korea historically based its development on the support of national companies and limited FDI until the 1990s. The article shows that the performance of foreign enterprises is technologically more intensive in South Korea compared to Brazil, and it offers an explanatory hypothesis to this phenomenon. Although a number of classical works compare the development models of Brazil and South Korea, this article innovates by focusing on the technological performance of foreign enterprises in those countries, a relatively unexplored subject in the literature.

South Korea; Brazil; technological globalization; R&D