Fundos Setoriais: Avaliação das Estratégias de Implementação e Gestão

This article analyses the commitment made by the Brazilian Ministry of Science andTechnology (MCT) to design and implement a sectoral funds policy in the countrywith three main goals: i) to increase and promote financial resource stability to ST&Isystem; ii) to elect the productive sector as the core of its actions; iii) to create aninstitutional environment conducive to a shared management of the funds by therelevant government agencies, namely Finep and CNPq. Although the funds policy wasdriven by the opportunity of entailing new resources to ST&I, it has become a significantfunding tool, representing nowadays as much as 30% of the MCT investments.The above notwithstanding, there is evidence that resources from the funds onlyrestores MCT investments back to the historical level. Available data also indicatesa low participation of the productive sector, which is attributed to a failure of the usedmechanisms to engage firms, particularly SMEs, in the programme. In addition sharedmanagement between the agencies was not achieved due to asymmetries in the controlof resources, operational capacity and established practices used to support ST&I.Finally, the text comments the restructure of the funds management in 2003,which concentrated power in the recently created Comissão de Coordenação dosFundos Setoriais. This Committee introduces the modality of transversal actions,which unties the resources of their applications sector, undermining the systemicadvantages that previous studies confer to the sectoral view. Out of these systemicstands, which determine firms and country performances, the sectoral system isreduced to an account expression only.