Innovating for Development

This paper attempts to reconcile two models for sustainable economic growth in developing countries. I develop an empirical and theoretical case for how the geographic landscape of a country determines the ease with which it can assimilate foreign technologies and establish institutions favorable to economic growth. I explore the threshold between the seemingly conflicting geographic (Sachs at al.) and institutional (Acemoglu et al.) theories, and economic growth. I do this by developing a technologically determinant, intermediate bifurcation where growth shifts from being geographically to institutionally driven after enough technology has been assimilated. My analysis finds that the rate of technological assimilation is determined by the landscape of a country. As the technology level increases, income level converges toward the level of developed countries. After reaching a certain threshold, however, economic growth appears to shift from being geographically driven to institutionally driven.

Any serious effort to address global climate disruption will require effective technology transfer. Developing countries with growing emissions must somehow make emission reductions without curtailing the economic development needed to alleviate poverty. This must be done in order to permit global abatement on the scale required to avoid dangerous climate disruption. Given the limited financial and technical capabilities of developing countries, this task seems impossible without technology transfer. As policymakers continue to embrace and enhance technology transfer options, it is critical to understand the relationship between technology transfer and policy development in order to formulate more effective policies. Whether through market mechanisms, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), or direct aid programs, such as the Green Climate Fund, we argue that technology transfer programs must support the elaboration of policies in developing countries by addressing three key issues: additionality, appropriate scale and the promotion of knowledge spillovers. We use these three principles to provide a framework for assessing the potential of both the CDM and direct financial aid to foster meaningful technology transfer, which we define as technology transfer that not only lowers the overall short-run costs of carbon reductions, but also enhances the capacity of these countries to address climate change more thoroughly in the future.

In developing countries, resource-dependent communities are disproportionately affected, yet less equipped to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change. Though generally associated with institutional adjustments, technology transfer, absorption and diffusion provide outstanding opportunities to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities and the ecosystems on which they rely to the risks of climate variability and extremes. In spite of the potential for technology diffusion as it emerges from the international regime, scientific evidence suggests that global efforts to transfer climate-smart technologies needed for successful adaptation in developing countries have fallen short. This paper examines current challenges and opportunities related to technology transfer for climate change adaptation in developing countries, as well as the contribution of the United Nations Development Programme - Climate Change Adaptation Team (UNDP-CCA) in promoting technology absorption and diffusion at the country level.

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program is one of the most ambitious educational reform initiatives the world has ever seen. The program has developed a radically new low-cost laptop computer and aggressively promoted its plans to put the computer in the hands of hundreds of millions of children around the world, including in the most impoverished nations. Though fewer than two million of the OLPC’s XO computers have been distributed as of this writing, the initiative has caught the attention of world leaders, influenced developments in the global computer industry and sparked controversy and debate about the best way to improve the lot of the world’s poor. With six years having passed since Nicholas Negroponte first unveiled the idea, this paper appraises the program’s progress and impact and, in so doing, takes a fresh look at OLPC’s assumptions. The paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings of OLPC, analyzes the program’s development and summarizes the current state of OLPC deployments around the world. The analysis reveals that provision of individual laptops is a utopian vision for the children in the poorest countries, whose educational and social futures could be more effectively improved if the same investments were instead made on more proven and sustainable interventions. Middle- and high-income countries may have a stronger rationale for providing individual laptops to children, but will still want to eschew OLPC’s technocentric vision. In summary, OLPC represents the latest in a long line of technologically utopian development schemes that have unsuccessfully attempted to solve complex social problems with overly simplistic solutions.

This paper discusses the potential role of copyright laws in technological and economic development. Although it is more common to think of the patent system as a source of economic and technological development, copyright laws and regulations affect cultural industries such as art, films, music and literature. These industries comprise an important part of gross domestic product and are a source of employment and income opportunities. Copyright regimes also affect education and scientific research through their impacts on the diffusion of knowledge embodied in copyright media, such as print and Internet publications, software and databases, among others. The copyright system can thus have an important influence on human capital accumulation. This paper surveys some of the theoretical and empirical work to date, assesses the implications of the findings for developing economies and identifies some areas where further research is needed.

An important challenge in sustainable development is promoting the creation of new medical technologies and ensuring their diffusion in developing countries. There is growing concern that, with the implementation of the World Trade Organization’s agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), pharmaceutical patents will restrict access to medicines globally. Profit-oriented companies are now aggressively pursuing intellectual property protections in developing countries, many of which had previously not allowed product patents on drugs. The concern is that absent generic competition, patients will not be able to access life-saving medications. Recent attention has focused on a perhaps unlikely set of actors to help ameliorate the access to medicines problem: American research universities. A decade-old student movement has argued that universities own intellectual property rights on many important drugs, and has pushed for inclusion of “humanitarian licensing” clauses that would compel the pharmaceutical firms that license these technologies to allow generic access in developing countries. In this paper, I discuss the emergence and evolution of this student movement, and the set of patent policy changes that got us here. I also summarize data on the feasibility of these policies: for how many drugs would changes in university policies plausibly affect access? Next, I discuss the desirability of changing university licensing practices and the tradeoffs universities face when considering humanitarian licensing approaches. I conclude with a discussion of the limits of campus-level initiatives alone, and the potentially important role for research funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, in promoting humanitarian licensing and access to medicines.

The confluence between the gender and information technology (IT) revolutions has the potential to create a new development paradigm. The transition from an industrial to a knowledge society opens up new opportunities for women in the emerging technology transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship (TIE) fields that avoid some of the negative consequences of academic science. The spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries empowers women by upgrading skills, enhancing employment opportunities, creating income for reinvestment and political strength. This article addresses the consequences of gender inequalities in depressing the contribution of women and the growing opportunities for them to use technology in order to take economic and social advancement into their own hands.

The merging of information technologies through digital transformation has strengthened the potential impacts of technology and education on social and economic development. Today’s rapid pace of change and the globalized impacts of those changes reinforce the need to develop a global culture of continuous learning and new models of higher education that will provide a continuous resource for knowledge updating and professional development. I argue that the modern university has fallen behind the pace of technological change and has become increasingly irrelevant to the reality of life in an interconnected and globalizing world. Academic ethnocentrism has evolved within the residential, discipline-oriented and tradition-defined higher education system. American universities have not kept up with the challenge of rapidly diagnosing and responding to increasingly complex and dynamic problems such as global warming, health and disaster mitigation. Current initiatives to improve U.S. development interventions fail to recognize the need to radically redesign higher education to implement the development initiatives of the future. A global technology- based educational movement reminiscent of the original concept of the land grant colleges in the United States is needed, which would tie an aggressive research agenda to critically examine the impacts of rapidly evolving technologies to a worldwide network of community-level agents of change that transmit positive results into immediate action. I outline a tentative plan of action based upon emerging evidence of better and more efficient training and educational models that are focused on broad-based sustainable development objectives. By removing the “techno-sclerotic” blinders and challenging the American academe to become more applied and more international, American universities can reassert their relevance and maintain their status as preeminent institutions of social change and innovation in the realm of global higher education.

There is a great deal of interest in the development and deployment of green technologies and the actions required on the part of industry, academia, governments and civil society to drive them forward. This paper uses the case of green technology in the global chemical sector to better elucidate the challenges of implementation of innovations for sustainable development, to analyze which approaches have been effective, and to provide generalizable knowledge about the types of strategies required to move these technologies from niche applications into widespread use. For green chemistry, and innovations for sustainable development more generally, there is a need for greater public intervention, including regulatory regimes that are strictly enforced, investment in basic research and education to build human capacity, more outreach programs in collaboration with industry to aid with technology transfer and implementation, and economic incentives for firms that may have the desire but not the financial capacity to make use of these innovations. Voluntary collaborations and the influence of major supply chain actors, on their own, are not powerful enough to catalyze the increases in scale that are needed for a real transition to sustainability.

A central goal of sustainable development is to maintain or increase the overall assets (natural, man-made, human and social) available to future generations while minimizing depletion of finite resources and without exceeding the carrying capacities of ecosystems. The essence of the Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainable development is expanding possibilities and keeping options open, not foreclosing them for future generations. The selection of technologies to advance sustainable energy development in any given country is a sovereign choice, and each country will need a mix of technologies suited to its situation and needs. As there exists no absolute yardstick for sustainable energy development and there is no technology without risk, wastes or interaction with the environment, nuclear energy’s compatibility with sustainable development objectives cannot be judged in isolation but only in comparison with available alternatives. This paper will provide such comparative assessments and specifically address concerns about nuclear power, such as the longevity of radioactive wastes, operating safety, weapons proliferation as well public and political acceptance. Based on the concept of weak sustainability’ and by applying a set of criteria for sustainable development, the paper will argue that the further development of nuclear power broadens the natural resource base for meeting growing global energy needs, increases technological and human capital, and, when safely handled, has little impact on human health and ecosystems along the full nuclear source-to-service energy chain. However, societies compare the benefits and risks of technologies from the menu of options available to them. As long as the real benefits exceed the risks of nuclear power, societies tend to accept the technology. The recent renaissance of interest in nuclear power is the result of changes in the risks and benefits of its key alternatives.