Technology and Underdevelopment

This book is about the impact of technology on development. That impact depends on the technology in use in underdeveloped countries, which is a function of the technology available to the country, and the choice made from the total available. This chapter is concerned to discuss the nature of the technological choice.

Employment, or rather its inadequacy, is a problem of major concern in most discussion of third world issues.¹ Advanced technology from developed countries is viewed with suspicion largely because of its failure to provide sufficient jobs. Yet there is little agreement about how the employment problem should be defined, or measured. While there is consensus that there is a major, possibly overriding problem, of an unspecified nature, when it comes to specification — and to an even greater extent proposed cures — concepts overlap, conflict and confuse. Analysis of the employment question is peculiarly dependent on analysis of technology questions, since technologies are largely categorised in terms of their employment effects. This chapter discusses some of the conceptual differences in approaches towards employment, and considers briefly how the different approaches give rise to alternative approaches towards technology.

Earlier (Chapter 1) we discussed the determinants of technological choice. This chapter is concerned to show how the historical development of technology described there has led to the use of inappropriate technology in the third world, and the implications of this for patterns of development. The next chapter considers the characteristics of what is described as ‘appropriate’ technology.

There is ambiguity as to what counts as appropriate technology. According to Morawetz (1974), ‘Appropriate technology may be defined as the set of techniques which make optimum use of available resources in a given environment. For each process or project, it is the technology which maximises social welfare if factor prices are shadow priced.’

The dependency theorists¹ are concerned with the whole relationship between advanced countries and third world countries: the dependent relationship is exhibited in cultural as well as economic features of third world countries. From this point of view the negritude movement in French Africa was as much a struggle against dependence as the (rather more prosaic) bargaining strategy of the Andean Pact countries. The dependent relationship pervades political institutions and political decision making as well. As a result many countries are incapable of following an alternative path, not only because the world economic facts of life make it impossible, but because the cultural, psychological and economic pressures of the dependent relationship have conditioned decision makers in third world countries so that they do not wish to follow an alternative strategy. Many conflicts which appear to be conflicts of interest between advanced countries and under-developed countries become internalised within third world countries, with powerful sections of the community representing the advanced-country interests within third world countries.

The role of heavy industry has been a subject of considerable controversy, both in practice¹ — see the Indian and Soviet debates — and in theory. Neo-classical economists distinguish between projects rather than industries. That is to say their methodology tends to assume that no particular merit (or demerit) may be attached to a project because it is in a particular industry — rather each project is to be evaluated for the effects to be attributed to it. In contrast, Marxist tradition has been to make a sharp distinction between capital goods industry (Department I)² and consumer goods (Department II), and much analysis hangs on this distinction. Developments of this distinction — in particular those of Feldman³ and Mahalanobis respectively — provided the justification for the build-up of heavy industry in Russia in the 1920s anil 1930s and in India in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter is concerned to explore these differences in approach, and to suggest other considerations, particularly technological development, which may justify special treatment for capital goods industries in developing countries.

The discussion so far has paid little attention to international trade. Yet a country’s trading relationships heavily influence patterns of production and consumption, and therefore the technology in use. This chapter considers the relationship between trade, development and technology.

The earlier parts of this book suggest the areas which require empirical illumination. Chapter 1 presented a general model of technological choice: each technique is associated with a vector of characteristics; the set of techniques available depends on the historical development of technology, and specifically the economic/social conditions of the economy for which the techniques were originally developed; each decision maker has certain objectives, a certain amount of knowledge about the technological possibilities, faces certain restraints, and controls a certain amount of resources. The actual choice made then depends on the interaction between decision makers and technological possibilities, given the various objectives and restraints. Ideally, empirical studies should try and illuminate this complex process — revealing for example how the historical development of the industry affects the technology available; whether and how one set of decision makers, e.g. multinational firms, make a different choice from another, e.g. local publicly owned firms; and why-e.g. because objectives differ, or because access to resources differ, or because markets differ. Chapter 4 presented a more specific empirical question: that is, the question of the existence and relative efficiency of an appropriate technology, and the sort of socio-economic changes that would be needed to get such a technology — if it exists — into use. This question is in a way a sub-question of the general model of technological choice in Chapter 1.

Maize is the staple food in large parts of Kenya.¹ In 1966 it was estimated that on average 13–17 million bags, or 250–300 lb per head were produced each year.² It is eaten in a number of ways, but is most often consumed in the form of a flour. In this form it is probably eaten by the majority of Kenyans at least once a day. Hence the process of grinding maize is potentially very big business affecting almost everyone. Maize is a subsistence crop and in normal conditions about 80 per cent of total production is not marketed but consumed by those who produce it.³ There is a wide range of methods of processing maize in use in Kenya. They extend to traditional methods, which pre-date historical records, involving the use of a wooden pestle and mortar, to the most modern roller mills, of identical design to those currently in use in the developed countries. Between these two extremes are hand-operated mills, water and grindstone mills, and hammer mills which are operated either by diesel engine or electric motor.

Cement blocks are, probably, the most important building material in urban Kenya. They are made by mixing cement, sand and small stones together and forming the mixture into blocks of varying size. The blocks are then used as bricks in the construction of buildings. Block manufacture was chosen because it was known that various different ways of making blocks were in use in Kenya. This study primarily focuses on these different methods. But cement blocks are just one building material among many. Some of the alternative building materials and the implications for choice of technique are considered at the end of the chapter.

The concern of this book has been to analyse the role of technology in the economic development of poor countries. What were the effects of the technology adopted? Were these effects inevitable given the nature of the technology available, or could a different choice from within the available range have produced significantly different results? What conditions would be necessary to secure a different choice? What determines the nature of the available technology and how could this be changed? Underlying these questions is a fundamental question about the nature of technology and of technological choice. Rather than provide a detailed step-by-step summary of the book, this chapter will try to focus directly on these questions, in the light of the earlier discussion.