The establishment of competitiveness as a Latin American development objective presupposes having some idea about how countries are promoted and supported in the sustained increase in productivity of their various activities.
According to Michael Porter, four factors can be decisive in competitiveness:
1. The country's endowment, in terms of quantity and quality of basic productive factors (labor force, natural resources, capital and infrastructure), as well as the specialized skills, knowledge and technologies that determine its ability to generate and assimilate innovations.
2. The nature of domestic demand in relation to the supply of the national productive apparatus; In particular, the presence of demanding claimants is relevant, who pressure the bidders with their demands for innovative articles and who anticipate their needs.
3. The existence of a productive structure made up of companies of different sizes, but efficient on an international scale, related horizontally and vertically, that encourages competitiveness through a specialized internal supply of inputs, technologies and skills to support a process of generalizable innovation to the along production chains.
4. The prevailing conditions in the country in terms of creation, organization and management of companies, as well as competition, mainly if it is fueled or inhibited by regulations and cultural attitudes towards innovation, profit and risk.
Taken together, these four actors determining a nation's competitiveness form a kind of dynamic system that is not limited to the sum of its parts, and that functions as a whole.
Currently, one of the most notorious common denominators among the vast majority of countries in the economic and political spheres is that to a greater or lesser degree they are engaged in conceptual, political and programmatic tasks to redefine the role of the State in the promotion and regulation of economic activity.
It is necessary to formulate and implement an industrial policy that allows its productive apparatus to generate the competitive advantages required for a successful insertion into the dynamics of the world economy. It is also convenient to eradicate the misunderstanding that identifies promotion with protection. In an environment of deep structural lags and numerous competitiveness problems, the lack of promotion mechanisms has been one of the main deficiencies of the modernization strategy.
The current characteristics facing developing countries are:
- Competing for the location of foreign investment production, where multinationals have more and more power, making the sovereignty of states vulnerable to the wishes of multinationals. I agree on the need to enter the global competition system. From there a good part of their energy has been dedicated to dismantling the old development models and, of course, since those plans were based on the action of the paternalistic state, then the priority has been their restructuring and modernization. a liberal ideology with its strategy. Millions of medium, small and micro producers find that the market in which their productive capacities were relevant has disappeared. They produced and marketed in and for local markets that were destroyed or better, expropriated.What was competitive in a regional or national market is not turning out to be competitive in the new globalized market, which is implying the massive destruction of the productive capacities that are in the hands of the vast majority of producers and workers in less advanced countries..
The conditions, therefore, throughout Latin America are not very favorable, and few companies manage to insert themselves adequately in the growth dynamic, configuring few business groups with a winning profile.
Generally with a family profile, they retain the leadership of the industries that operate in the countries and represent the nucleus of the large national industrial - financial groups.
Faced with these world realities, the different economic blocks apply different policies to face the challenges of global competition. At one end of the spectrum are countries that have managed to overcome the obstacles to income and productivity convergence with the developed world in a few decades, and at the other, those that have not yet managed to identify how to get rid of the obstacles. relative and absolute backwardness.
The former are concerned with generating their own sources of innovation and technological change and consolidating the march towards activities of increasing added value. The latter must still experiment with socially viable forms of institutional and social progress, identify sustainable activities that allow for the accumulation of resources in an open economy, the institution of markets and the creation of the necessary capacities for structural change.
Latin America can experience such structural change, if it is able to manage its potential, together with more active development policies…
Bibliography
PORTER Michael. "The Competitive Advantage of Nations", Free Press, New York, 1990.
GARRIDO Celso. The Leadership of Large Mexican Industrial Companies. In "Large Latin American companies and industrial groups". Twenty first century. First edition 1998.
