National health problems and useful knowledge: lessons from public funding of diabetes research in Mexico

José Miguel Natera, Soledad Rojas-Rajs, Gabriela Dutrénit and Alexandre O. Vera-Cruz

Innovation and Development, 2019, vol. 9, issue 2, 205-224

Abstract: Diabetes Mellitus has become an urgent national health problem in Mexico. We would expect knowledge production, particularly when is publicly funded, to be oriented towards the generation of useful applications and to collaborate in the solution of this disease. In this paper, we aim at analysing knowledge production for diabetes in terms of the Pasteur's quadrant, which consist of two axes: (i) ‘consideration of knowledge use’ and (ii) ‘search for fundamental knowledge’. We organized 303 diabetes projects supported by CONACYT funds to operationalize a structural equation modelling (SEM) that frames diabetes research in Mexico. We found that most of research funds are not devoted to projects with high levels of ‘consideration of knowledge use’; we believe that this is caused by the context of scientific funding in Mexico, which have incentives for basic research and does not count with sufficient mechanisms to orient the use of new scientific knowledge. We outline some policy recommendations. First, incentives should be focused on reorienting the research system towards a greater consideration of knowledge use. Second, the project approval process could also be modified to be more democratic, which the scientific community could discuss and find consensus with other social actors.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/2157930X.2019.1567906 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:riadxx:v:9:y:2019:i:2:p:205-224

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/riad20

DOI: 10.1080/2157930X.2019.1567906

Access Statistics for this article

Innovation and Development is currently edited by K J Joseph (Editor-in-chief), Cristina Chaminade, Gabriela Dutrénit, Judith Sutz, Tim Turpin and Susan Cozzens

More articles in Innovation and Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().