Technology and Developing Countries: a Review and an Agenda for Research

Recent years have witnessed a sustained growth of interest, by academics as well as policy-makers, in the subject of technological development in the Third World. While the early development literature had tended to ignore the role of technology in the process of industrial development and in determining changing patterns of comparative advantage, and concentrated on ‘gaps’ in savings and foreign exchange, later thinking has come to view technological ‘gaps’ as being almost as significant as gaps in investible resources. Economic historians have always been aware of the crucial role of innovation and diffusion in industrial growth,2 but the mainstream of economic analysis has never been able to assimilate these into its theory in a meaningful or realistic way.