Institutions to facilitate technology transfer from highly developed nations

Abstract

Every country in this world requires technologies to improve the quality of life. The highly developed wealthy nations, being rich in scientific and technological expertise, are able to develop most of the technologies required to fulfil their own needs. On the other hand, many of the developing countries are so engrossed in the physical development to provide shelter and food for their teeming millions and their resources re so strained that they are in no position to undertake costly scientific and technological projects to develop high level technologies for their own requirements. They depend on technologies transferred from the industrialised nations. Development of technologies is a costly affair. It is only economically justified if the technologies have a large market. For this reason, the large industrialised countries have an advantage over the smaller nations because of the size of their domestic market. In terms of scientific and technological manpower, too, the larger industrialised countries have an edge over the smaller ones as they can afford to use more manpower on the individual R&D projects and at the same time undertake a larger number of projects. It is thus not surprising that even among the highly developed nations, the larger nations have more technologies to offer than the smaller ones, and it is common practice for the small developed nations to import technologies from the larger industrialised nations.