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Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Institutional Change: The Dynamics of Building Industry Alliances in Venezuela

Arnolod Pirela is Professor, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo, Caracas, Venezuela. E-mail: pirela{at}cantv.net.

This article presents and analyses the final results of a four-year experience aimed at developing innovative capacities and competitiveness by creating alliances between the state-owned oil company (PDVSA), and national firms supplying goods and services to the Venezuelan oil and petrochemical industry. The article proposes a different approach from the standard analysis on firm behaviour, innovation competitiveness, and cooperative organisation and alliances that tend to disregard national environment, including national political developments and government ideological orientations. We make a case in favour of the analysis of the long-term macro-economic and macro-political trends and ideological orientations of a country, as well as how firms attempt to develop their competitiveness and the collaboration programmes supposedly taking place. We argue in favour of this approach in countries with high levels of political and economic instability, such as most underdeveloped nations. This is the case of several Latin American countries at present, especially of the Venezuelan oil-driven economy. A country now in a ‘u-turn’ economy, and maybe the only one since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union trying to impose a kind of planned economy and socialism.

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