Technology

Sérgio Oliveira Birchal
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Sérgio Oliveira Birchal: UNA School of Business

Chapter 4 in Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1999, pp 128-183 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The prime influence behind the more or less rapid rates of economic growth of the Western European economies during the last 200 years has been technological progress,1 a necessary element of economic development. Capital goods, the means of production in which much of technology has been embodied, have enormously increased productivity. In the absence of technological progress, the process of growth by capital accumulation and division of labour as proposed by Adam Smith would eventually have encountered diminishing returns. The process of economic development is not only a matter of the increase of capital goods of the same type.2 As Schumpeter has pointed out, economic development consists primarily in the employment of different resources in a different way, in doing different things with them. Different methods of employment of economic resources, and not savings and the increase in the availability of labour, has changed the face of the world.3 Furthermore, over the years one of the key indicators of the formation of a positive business environment is the capacity of an economy to absorb and refine imported technology.

Keywords: Nineteenth Century; Blast Furnace; Textile Industry; Skilled Labour; Technical Knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-27115-3_4

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27115-3_4

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