Innovación tecnológica y desigualdad laboral y salarial en las empresas manufactureras argentinas

This paper examines the connection between the innovative level in manufacturing companies from Argentina and two key labor dimensions: wage inequality and productive worker qualifications. After the end of the Convertibility Plan, the manufacturing industry experienced a recomposition evidenced by continuous transformations in its productive, technological and labor dynamics. In a context of increasing national and international competitiveness, companies that coped with innovative processes have reached a variety of results in this area, with impacts on the nature and composition of their human resources. Although there are relevant antecedents in Sociology and Economics of the association between technological change and inequality, at an aggregate level in the central economies, the authors found only few studies that addressed this problem in developing countries at the firm level. Consequently, an interdisciplinary approach through a quantitative methodology is adopted, starting from the preliminary hypothesis that greater innovative efforts in manufacturing firms yield higher levels of wage inequality and broader qualification gaps among them. Data used in this study come from the National Survey of Employment and Innovation (ENDEI), for Argentine manufacturing companies in 2010-2012.