Our work provides a selective survey of the literature on the relation between natural resources and industrialization, with a focus on extractive industries. The paper consists of three sections. First, it discusses the main problems identified by the scholars in relation to the abundance of natural resources. Second, it addresses two dimensions of the nexus between natural resources and industrial development: a fiscal one and a productive one. Third, it critically examines the two dimensions in order to find the conditions needed to set up a strategy of industrial development applicable to the extractive industries. Then, it briefly discusses some relevant issues partially neglected in early literature, and then suggests insights for further research.

The commodity boom at the turn of the millennium spawned growing interest in development strategies based on natural resources. The Brazilian government introduced a groundbreaking contractual clause to force oil companies to invest into research and development (R&D) 1% of gross revenues from large oilfields, with the aim of fostering technological development. To analyze the impacts of the R&D clause, we conducted 73 in-depth interviews with key informants from the oil sector. We also carried out a survey of 156 project coordinators. Our findings suggest that the R&D clause has strengthened the contribution to technological development by the national oil company, meanwhile involving new actors. The R&D clause has also boosted scientific research, technological capabilities, and innovation. However, it had a minor impact on fostering the relations between oil companies and service companies, and technology-based firms have played only a minor role.

Since its formal creation in 1953, Petrobras has operated in monopoly in the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry in Brazil. In 1997, the Congress approved the law 9478/1997 (Petroleum Law), which set a fundamental change in the legal framework and allowed other competitors to enter into the market. Since then, the government has also implemented a set of new regulations in the O&G sector to foster local content as well as investments in science, technology and innovation. Here we aim to understand how the regulatory environment affects technological development in the upstream O&G industry. Our methodology consists of two pillars. First, we provide a critical review of the literature about the broad relation between natural resources and economic development. We find that technological development is a key driver of productive linkages from the primary sector and we suggest that the regulatory environment plays a major role. Second, we adopt both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze three specific mechanisms of the regulatory framework for the case of Brazil. Our results are two-fold. On one hand, the regulatory environment has prompted significant investments in science, technology and innovation in the O&G industry; also, it has promoted the establishment of new partnerships between the oil industry and the Science and Technology Institutions (STIs). On the other hand, some regulations as well as recent modifications have hampered investments in science and technology, especially due to a low involvement of the suppliers. An important conclusion is that, for the case of Brazil, the R&D center Petrobras has played a leading role in fostering technological development. Though, the regulatory environment needs to be revised to involve more actors in this process; more coherent and coordinated policies are needed to promote both local content and innovation at the same time. This paper differs from previous literature in two key aspects. First, whereas other scholars tend to study the macroeconomic and governance-related issues of natural resources, here we analyze their productive implications. Second, our work combines both quantitative and qualitative research methods; both questionnaires and semi-structured interviews have allowed us to collect primary data at micro-level.

This paper describes the full procedure adopted in the context of the Clavius on the Web project, which aims to help Web users to appraise the importance of specific manuscripts by going beyond their digital reproduction. The proposed approach is based on the multilayered explication of linguistic, lexical and semantic data representing the innermost nature of the analyzed manuscripts. The final purpose of the project is to gather and display the results of the three layers of analysis through interactive visualization techniques and export them as Linked Data. All the analyses rely on the XML/TEI encoding of the text, followed by a CTS-based tokenization. As a working example for this paper, the analysis of a portion of a manuscript provided by Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University will be illustrated. The text is a letter written in Latin and sent by Botvitus Nericius to Christophorus Clavius in 1598 from Madrid.

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