CGEE Director participates in international meeting on industrial policy and innovation.

In a lecture at Cambridge, Caetano Penna analyzed the challenges facing Latin America in light of geopolitical transformations and the green and digital transitions.

The director of the Center for Management and Strategic Studies (CGEE), Caetano Penna, participated, this Tuesday (15), in the International Meeting of Industrial Innovation Policymakers, promoted by the Babbage Industrial Policy Forum , in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The program brought together representatives from more than 20 countries to share experiences and discuss trends and challenges related to industrial and innovation policies.

Penna was one of the speakers at the opening session, “The Global Context,” alongside experts who presented perspectives from Asia, China, Europe, and the United States. In the presentation “Latin America: Industrial Policy Under Hemispheric Pressure,” the director analyzed the main factors, recent changes, and trends influencing the formulation of industrial policies in the region.

According to Penna, Latin America faces geopolitical pressures and electoral realignments that add to persistent structural problems, such as low productivity, deindustrialization, and a reduction in the base of professional, technological, and scientific skills.

"Latin American industrial policy is being reshaped by two simultaneous pressures: hemispheric coercion and electoral realignment, which overlap with remaining structural challenges," he summarized.

The director emphasized that industrial policy has once again taken center stage on the public agenda, but countries in the region still face institutional, financial, and technical limitations in transforming strategies into concrete results. Although financing and production support instruments have been rebuilt, the response from the business sector remains slow and uneven.

The exhibition also drew attention to the need to add value to Latin America's natural resources. Despite holding significant portions of the world's reserves of strategic minerals, such as lithium, copper, niobium, graphite, and rare earth elements, the region still has limited participation in the processing and industrialization stages.

In the case of rare earth elements, for example, Brazil holds about 25% of the world's reserves, but accounts for only 0.5% of production. For Penna, the challenge is to link access to mineral resources to local production, technological development, and the formation of regional value chains.

A similar risk arises in the digital transition. With predominantly clean energy grids, Latin American countries have attracted investments in data centers and computing infrastructure. Energy, however, could become a new exported raw material without a corresponding generation of local productive and technological capabilities.

In this context, Penna highlighted the importance of policies that establish counterpart measures related to research and development, skills training, national production, and the strengthening of companies in the region. The presentation also addressed the New Industry Brazil, which accounted for R$ 300 billion in financing approved by the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) between 2023 and 2025, as one of the main regional experiences of mission-oriented industrial policy.

Contributions from the meeting held in Brazil

The presentation also brought to Cambridge the main contributions from the Babbage Forum regional meeting for Latin America, held on April 28 at the headquarters of the Financing Agency for Studies and Projects (Finep) in Rio de Janeiro. Organized by CGEE and the Babbage Forum , the meeting brought together approximately 22 experts and policymakers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and the United Kingdom, as well as representatives from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The debates highlighted that, although industrial policy has regained legitimacy and space on government agendas, Latin American countries still face difficulties in transforming strategies into results. Among the challenges identified are inequalities in institutional capacities; the concentration of coordination in the bodies that control financial resources; the difficulty of reconciling strategic priorities and social participation; the slow response of companies to public instruments; the advancement of artificial intelligence as infrastructure; and the lack of regional coordination in the face of geopolitical disputes.

As ways to address these challenges, participants advocated linking access to strategic minerals to local production and technology transfer; creating regional evaluation mechanisms to ensure policy continuity beyond election cycles; and maintaining a Latin American network dedicated to exchanging experiences on industrial policy and innovation.

In Cambridge, these contributions added to discussions on prioritizing and scaling up emerging technologies; strengthening the skills and institutions responsible for formulating public policies; coordinating national and regional priorities and capacities; and planning and upskilling the workforce.

The Babbage Industrial Policy Forum maintains an international community of experts and policymakers focused on exchanging experiences and developing solutions to contemporary economic, technological, and geopolitical challenges. Participation in the forum reinforces CGEE's role in international collaboration and the production of strategic knowledge for science, technology, innovation, and development policies.