Catching up in pharmaceuticals: a comparative study of India and Brazil
Samira Guennif & Shyama V. Ramani
#2010-019
Since the mid-twentieth century, the national objective of India and
Brazil has been to develop industrial capabilities in essential sectors
such as pharmaceuticals. At the outset, they shared some common
features: a considerable period of lax intellectual property rights
regimes, large internal market and a reasonably strong cadre of
scientists and engineers. However, over fifty years, India has had much
more success in building indigenous capabilities in pharmaceuticals than
Brazil, at least to date. Why? In exploring the answer to this question,
we show that in both countries the design of State policy played a
crucial role and the endogenous responses in the national system of
innovation consisted of two parts. On the one hand, most of the time,
the predicted and desired outcome was partially realized and on the
other hand, there were invariably, other unpredicted responses that
emerged. The latter unexpected elements, which were specific to the two
countries, pushed them along distinctive trajectories.
Keywords: Pharmaceutical industry, India, Brazil, industrial
capabilities, Catch-up.
JEL codes: O330, O380, O570.
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
ISSN 1871-9872