Science, technology and production in the underdeveloped countries: An introduction

Abstract

The uncritical notion that it would be easy to orient science and technology towards productive purposes in the less developed countries has been superseded by a more analytic (and sceptical) approach. Scientific activities in less developed countries themselves tend to be a form of consumption rather than investment and the reasons for this lie in dependence on external sources of technology and in the structure of under‐development itself. Yet dependence on proprietary technology from the advanced countries raises its own problems. Some of these arise because production technology is often in private ownership; it is a property of large enterprises. Others arise because western technology is inappropriate both because it produces over‐specified commodities and because it makes intensive use of resources which are scarce in less developed countries.