The importance of foreign technology in Portuguese leading industrial enterprises

Abstract

The causes that originate a certain level of functioning in enterprises are quite different, it is impossible to restrict them to the influence of foreign technology. Nevertheless it is true that foreign technology whenever exists, has a clear influence on all the other causest what is enough to make it possible for us to consider that it is a strongly determinant factor in the different (better) functioning of the enterprises where it is applied. Taking for a starting-point a list of the 1000 leading Portuguese enterprises, the author begins with detaching those enterprises belonging to the trasforming industry, what gives him a list of 644 enterprises. From the interconnection of these 644 entreprises with the list of those having taken foreign technology in the seventies one reaches to a set of 241 entreprises, what enables us to conclude that only a little more than the third part of the leading Portuguese industrial enterprises have profited from the influence - supposedly good under a methodological point of view - of foreign technology. After analysing the results from the global study of these three groups of enterprises, the author examines the influence of foreign technology on industrial enterprisest according to the nature of their social capital; he notes some aspects of this influence in connection with those sectors to which the entreprises belong; and finally he remarks the impossibility, for the scientific and technological policy, of ignoring the importance of foreign technology, which is considered to be vital for the modernization processus of the Portuguese economy.