Technological gap between small firms in Brazil and European countries

The debate about technological gap starts from the idea that firms and countries with different levels of technological development have different economic results, in terms of income level or competitiveness. The aim of this paper is to investigate the existence of technological gap between Brazil and select European countries based on innovation surveys, such as Community Innovation Survey (CIS) and Pesquisa de Inovaclio Tecnologica (PINTEC) for 2014. Using a methodology based in the concept of "Euclidean distance", we build indicators such as Innovation Index and Efficiency in Innovation Efforts Index, both from data about innovative effort and results. The main results suggest that, compared to Europeans countries, small firms in Brazil not only have a high gap in the Innovation Index, but also in Efficiency in Innovation Efforts Index.