The Other Latecomers

In recent years, developing countries have seen the emergence of successful and innovative firms, albeit often with state support. Argentina, which faces challenges including industrial decline and macroeconomic turbulence, offers an intriguing context for studying latecomer firms, as few have managed to innovate and compete globally without significant state backing.

This book examines why and how latecomer firms facing adverse policies and hostile macroeconomic conditions can nevertheless survive, grow, and catch up with global competitors, while many other firms lag or fall further behind. It presents, on one hand, a theoretical framework that builds on contributions made by Gerschenkron (1962) and Hobday (1995) on latecomer catch-up in economic development theory, and on those by Nelson (1991, 2008) on firm-level differences in evolutionary theory; on the other, it provides a contextual framework for the catching-up experiences of firms from East Asia and Latin America, which ends with a description of Argentina’s main detrimental policy regimes over the past 50 years.

Further, the book presents an statistical analysis of manufacturing firms’ performance, along with the corporate characteristics that underlie it, within the context of Argentina’s worst economic crisis to determine which firm characteristics stood out during times of crisis (e.g. innovation and organizational capabilities). To supplement the quantitative analysis and offer additional insights, it introduces two in-depth case studies on iconic latecomer firms, TENARIS and IMPSA, which, bolstered by the examination of over nearly half a million newspaper articles, illustrate their global success amidst numerous challenges. It emphasizes the importance of long-term corporate strategy, a flexible organizational structure, and a coherent set of technological and organizational capabilities, while also addressing policy implications, making it a valuable asset for researchers, policymakers, and corporate managers alike.