Applying Comprehensive Neo-Schumpeterian Economics to Latin American Economies

The paper develops a Comprehensive Neo-Schumpeterian theory of development allowing synthesizing the market-driven, the state-driven and the more recent knowledge-based approaches. The theoretical part of this paper identifies (i) freedom and social welfare, (ii) knowledge and innovations, and (iii) future-oriented economic structures as mutual interconnected and reinforcing objective classes of development. In the empirical part we reveal characteristic patterns and structural bottlenecks in the future-orientation of Latin American economies. While in some countries knowledge is the main bottleneck for future-oriented development, other countries suffer from inefficient economic structures or the exclusion of large parts of the population from economic life.