http://hum.ttu.ee/wp/paper19.pdf

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Interest in technical change has grown explosively in the last decade. Industrial policy, both in developed and developing countries, increasingly includes an explicit technology component. For this reason technological forecasts are becoming a prerequisite for planning. Two questions then arise: How reliable are technological forecasts? How useful are they as a guide for development strategies?

Past experience is highly uneven. In general there would seem to be a gap between the capacity for extrapolating trends in technology itself and that for predicting rates of diffusion in the productive sphere. This gap is wider the newer the technology and becomes narrower as the diffusion process develops, when related social and economic factors have become manifest revealing the selection criteria.

In fact, the world of the technically feasible is far greater than that of the economically profitable and that of the socially acceptable. And the two latter sets do not coincide either. This could mean that pure technological forecasting would be of limited use as a guide for development policy. A fuller exploration is required in order to identify the economic and social forces that drive and influence the course of technical change, as well as the forms in which technology influences the economy and society. This paper is an attempt in that direction.

The first part presents a set of categories with which to approach the analysis of technical change. In the second part, a hypothesis is presented about the constitution and diffusion of successive “techno-economic paradigms”. The crystallization of each paradigm would produce a radical shift in the course of evolution of the technologies of a given period, resulting in profound structural change in the economic sphere. The third part examines the way in which such a process of structural change would demand equally profound transformations in the socio-institutional sphere.

Following this general model of analysis, it is suggested that we are at present in a period of global technological transition, which offers new opportunities for outlining development strategies. Profiting from these new possibilities would require understanding the defining features of the new techno-economic paradigm, which, in the present case would be the system of technologies based upon microelectronics. Part four, then, examines some of these features, pointing to the specific ways in which they influence the direction of technological evolution in products, production processes and in the forms of organization of the firm. Part five explores the possible impact of the new prevailing technological model upon other new technologies, specifically: new energy sources, new materials and biotechnology. The final section is a discussion of some of the implications of the technological transition for development strategies.