Technological Progress, Diffusion and Opportunities for Developing Countries

Underdeveloped nations have a long history of attempts to overcome their level of socioeconomic advancement. One can perceive the interconnection between the stage of the developed country and its level of technological advancement. In the present research, a quantitative approach was used in order to examine the impact of technological innovation in developing countries, with a particular focus on the Brazilian economy. The study was conducted using indicators extracted from the databases of the Global Innovation Index (GII) reports from 2013 to 2022. The sample covers the economies of Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador. Cluster analysis, also known as clustering, refers to computational techniques that make it possible to categorize objects into distinct groups. This method, belonging to the area of Multivariate Statistics, aims to divide the elements into two or more clusters based on the similarity between them, according to previously established criteria. These criteria are usually based on a dissimilarity function, which evaluates the distance between two objects. Among the countries covered by the GII report (with the exception of Colombia, due to the excessive lack of databases), Brazil is the country that has the highest degree of investment allocation in Education in relation to its GDP. Followed by Chile and Argentina, which until 2017 was the leader in the category. Among the countries analyzed, the ones with the highest congruence in terms of indicator performance are Brazil and Chile, Brazil and Ecuador, Chile and Uruguay, Colombia and Uruguay, and Ecuador and Paraguay