As Políticas industriais de clusters como ferramenta para o desenvolvemento económico

Abstract

Due to the strong dependence of the economy on the extraction of natural resources, in 2005 the government of Kazakhstan approved the plan to create and develop seven pilot clusters. The implementation of cluster policy by the Kazakh government raises questions about the adequateness of the specific clusters that were defined, in particular the metallurgical cluster in the East Region of Kazakhstan. This dissertation involves three parts. The first part measures the linkages among industries, in order to know what economic sectors are interconnected and to which extent. Using the Kazakhstan input-output table for 2009 and a regionalization of it for the East Region, we identify the industries linked by supplier-buyer relationships and compute the strength of their forward and backward linkages. Then, we apply factor analysis to the input-output table in order to group industries into clusters. The second part builds indicators about innovation performance and its determinants in the East Kazakhstan region with the explicit aim of being comparable with those available for other economies. In this part a scoreboard of indicators was built, following the methodology of the European Innovation Scoreboard. In the third and final part, some tests of the theoretical framework investigating the key factors of innovation performance are provided. Probit regression analysis is employed to estimate the determinants of innovation performance in Kazakhstan. The data used comes from the Kazakhstan ¿ Enterprise Survey 2009, conducted by The World Bank during calendar year 2008/2009. Multi-level relationships between business organizations and innovation are also addresed in this part. The literature distinguishes between two modes of learning and innovation, the Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) mode and the Doing, Using, and Interacting (DUI). In order to take into account the specificities of the East Kazakhstan Metallurgical Cluster, a survey was conducted among a sample of firms, with the aim to identify the dominant mode of innovation within the cluster.