IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-27115-3_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Technology

In: Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Author

Listed:
  • Sérgio Oliveira Birchal

    (UNA School of Business)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Sérgio Oliveira Birchal, 1999. "Technology," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, chapter 4, pages 128-183, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-27115-3_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27115-3_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-27115-3_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.