Book Launch:Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:

“An interesting contribution to the interaction of financial capital with technological progress,” was how the executive president of the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), Enrique García, described the book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Venezuelan researcher Carlota Pérez. García made his comments at the book launch which took place on Wednesday in the headquarters of this multilateral financial institution.

García said the work offered lessons for a regional context characterized by scarce capital flows, restriction on credit for the private sector, absence or non-existence of risk capital and low competitiveness.

The author develops ideas that are an interesting challenge for organizations like the CAF and for its shareholder countries, the president added. These ideas are in line with one of the objectives that this multilateral institution has been developing, which is the creation of a new development agenda with its own identity and integrated vision, aimed at promoting the competitiveness and equitable integration of Latin America in the global economy.

In the book, Carlota Pérez says that the collapse of financial markets and the current slowdown in the world economy are necessary ills, which will later lead to deployment and expansion of the full potential of information technology and telecommunications.

The researcher shows how, over the last 200 years, each of the major technological revolutions has brought a financial boom, whose collapse reveals a divorce between paper values and real values, and exposes a pattern of fraudulent activities. What has followed these other processes, and could perhaps be the next state of the information revolution, is a regulatory wave and an institutional reorganization in favor of an economic boom based on an expansion of production and markets.

"Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital" is the crystallization of the author’s 20 years of research on the role of new technologies in the global processes of economic and social development.

In the mid-1980s, Carlota Pérez began to make a name in international circles involved in the study of technological and industrial development and innovation, etc. In 1983, her pioneering work on the role of microelectronics in the process of world economic development became essential reading for academics in this area of research. Her field has grown over the years to include the role played by financial capital in the appearance, promotion, dissemination and exhaustion of each technological revolution and in the new techno-economic paradigm that accompanies it.

Published in English by Edward Elgar Publishing, a well-known British publisher, the book has generated great interest in the international community as reflected in the recent comments in the magazines Business Week and Business 2.0.