Supply - led Technology Adoption in Maranhao , Brazil : a Case of Developmental

In the pre-Amazon region of Western Maranhao, in Northeast Brazil, small-scale furniture firms have proliferated and grown in size in the last 6 to 8 years. This sector offers an alternative for economic development, to the simple exploitation of wood resources on which the economy of the region is currently based. Relative to this activity, furniture-making is less environmentally destructive and more easily accessible for the lower strata of the population. In a region where wealth is unequally distributed, furniture firms have been successfully started and are still controlled by low and middle class entrepreneurs. Much of this growth depended on new production techniques. Two main actors have jointly contributed to disseminate this new technology: a private firm supplying inputs to the furniture sector, and the quasi-public agency in charge of vocational training. From the analysis of this cooperative agreement, the paper draws some lessons concerning the conditions under which similar public-private partnerships can produce positive outcomes and private developers of technology can be successfully involved in public technology policy. Demand-side agents have not contributed in the same way to the growth of small-scale firms, because they didn't have a direct impact on technological change. A comparison between the cases analyzed in different towns suggests that representative agents have been more helpful for larger firms producing furniture in series, than for the smaller enterprises, due to their insufficient production turnover. The role of demand-side agents was also more conservative in the sense that it tended to reproduce the existing specialization of the region in low cost and low value added productions.