The Role of the Public Research Infrastructure in the Brazilian Nation Innovation System.
In recent years, the Brazilian infrastructure of science & technology (S&T) has had significant contributions from several funding sources. Both the sectoral funds, as well as resources from the Ministry of Education, the state foundations for supporting research (FAPs) and companies like Petrobras funded these investments. It was, thus, widely hypothesized that the infrastructure of scientific and technological research available in the country is now much more up to date than some years ago. In spite of this, the country had not assessed until now how these investments improved its technological capacities.
We build our analysis on data collected in a comprehensive web survey undertaken with the support of the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI). This investigation approach is, to the best of our knowledge, unique in Brazil. Among the 185 invited institutions, 130 took part in the survey, which represents a response rate close to 70% between the institutions. In terms of the research infrastructure, the unit of analysis adopted in this paper, 2,119 answered the questionnaire, which corresponds to more than 40% of the estimated number of research laboratories. Even though the universe of laboratories is supposed to be higher than that, we believe our sample to be fairly representative.
If the production of S & T requires, in addition to human capital, high level institutions and infrastructures, it is reasonable to assume that this structure should allow the exploitation of economies of scope and scale needed for most of modern scientific research. However, our results show that Brazil has very few institutions with these characteristics. The survey shows that the vast majority of the country´s research infrastructure consists of small scattered laboratories in universities. The typical infrastructure has on average four researchers, whose research equipment, in about 90% of cases, cost less than US $ 2 million.
Not surprisingly, only 13% of respondents stated that their lab is compatible with the best infrastructures of its kind abroad, despite the growth in the volume of investments made in the last decade. In fact, more than half (56%) of laboratories that responded to the competitive infrastructure questionnaire was created in the 2000s, and many of them have made significant investments over the past five years. If, at first, these numbers seem to suggest a relatively new research infrastructure, it is clear that this does not necessarily mean a modern, updated and competitive infrastructure.