Comércio exterior brasileiro de acordo com a intensidade tecnológica dos setores industriais: notas sobre as décadas de 1990 e 2000 [Brazilian foreign trade according to manufacturing industries’ technological intensity: notes on the 1990s and 2000s]

The quality of the insertion of a country into foreign trade is an indirect way of assessing the degree of technological dependence of its industrial sectors and of qualifying the possibility of an effective transfer of technology through imports. Based on two premises, we seek to analyze the Brazilian foreign trade according to the technological intensity of the industrial sectors. The first is that importing technology can foster the rapid modernization of the importing nation and also serves as an indicator of lack of technological capability. The second is that the export of technology may indicate the technological capability of a nation. With the Brazilian data, it is verified that, from 1996 to 2010, there was a negative trade balance of “high technology industries”, that is, Brazil is “debtor of goods with high technological density”. In contrast, Brazil presented, during the same period, a positive balance in the trade of “low technology industries”.