SciDev.Net

In 2005, the World Health Assembly called on WHO member states to tackle their growing rates of cancer by developing rigorous cancer control programmes. To help guide the process, the WHO developed a series of six modules that provide practical advice for programme managers and policy-makers on how to advocate, plan and implement effective cancer control programmes, particularly in developing countries.

Individual modules focus on planning; prevention; early detection; diagnosis and treatment; palliative care; and policy and advocacy. As of May 2008, all but the one on policy and advocacy have been published.

Worldwide, cancer kills more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB put together. In developing countries where chronic diseases are now growing alongside infectious diseases, new strategies need to be developed.

This article outlines how to develop an effective cancer strategy in African countries on the basis of discussions at the recent African Cancer Reform convention. A cancer control plan clearly needs to take into account African countries' financial constraints and the authors outline six key essentials that would offer most health gain for money invested. These are: setting up cancer intelligence units to collect data on cancer incidence; controlling tobacco use; early diagnosis and prevention; offering treatment wherever possible; palliative care when treatment is no longer useful; and training and educating future generations of African oncologists.

Developed countries can offer crucial expertise and experience and collaborate on cancer information networks. Educating local communities about a disease that is relatively new but growing quickly will also be essential to stop it spiralling when many cancers are preventable or treatable when detected early enough.

In 2003, the Gates foundation infused new vigour into global health efforts by declaring that the 21st century's "grand challenges" included developing new vaccines and overcoming drug resistance. This new grand challenges initiative, launched by a collaboration of top global chronic disease experts, identifies priorities in tackling diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and explains in detail how research should be directed to meet each challenge (a challenge was defined as a critical barrier that if removed would help solve an important health problem).

To distill the range of opinions and priorities, the coordinators sought input from 155 stakeholders from different countries and disciplines. The initiative requires the participation of agencies like the WHO, individual governments, and non-governmental organisations as well as civil society and business if it is to succeed. The authors point out that the Gates initiative was linked to large funding, whereas this project will rely on multiple funding agencies to coordinate on these priorities.

Global health experts have watched with increasing alarm as the waistlines of people in developing countries have started to widen with the adoption of a "Western" lifestyle. Obesity is of such concern because of its heightened risks for other diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

In developing countries, the number of people with diabetes is set to rise to 228 million by 2030 from 84 million estimated in 2000. The link between obesity and diabetes is so strong because obesity renders individuals unable to properly process glucose — about 90% of type 2 diabetes is due to being overweight. Obesity and diabetes also raise the risk for cardiovascular disease and kidney disease. Diabetic nephropathy was the most common cause of end-stage renal disease in 9 out of 10 Asian countries, say the authors, which could be deadly for countries unable to cope with the health repercussions.

The African Union (AU) developed the African Model Law on Safety in Biotechnology to help countries across the continent fulfil their obligations under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and manage related issues.

The AU encourages the development of a common position on biosafety regulation (see AU Biosafety Project) across the continent. It does not have the authority to legislate on behalf of its members — but it promotes the Model Law as a framework for individual countries to use in creating their own laws and institutions.

The Model Law is being revised through an ongoing consultation process before submission to AU governments for possible adoption at national level.

This document attempts to inform and re-invigorate the debate on international technology transfer. The author, John H. Barton at Stanford School of Law, argues for the need to revisit this issue in line with the recognition that economic activities are more globalised than they were in the 1970s, and developing countries have greater scientific and technological capacities.

Barton focuses on three mechanisms of international technology transfer: the flow of human resources; the flow of public-sector technology support; and the flow of private technology from multinational corporations to developing countries. He recommends ways to remove barriers to each. He argues for greater mobility within, and globalisation of, the world’s scientific enterprise and reasserts an economic rationale for investing in public-sector research in developing countries.

The paper is likely to be useful to developing country policymakers interested in intellectual property rights, trade and development, as well as scientists and technologists more generally.

This article examines technological catch-up — how developing countries build up their technological capabilities to compete with industrialised nations — and the implications for donor agencies providing technical assistance.

It looks at how the literature on links between economic growth and technological change has evolved and discusses how the concept of technological catch-up emerged.

The authors argue that technical assistance programmes should focus on supporting education and training systems and fostering links between developing and developed countries' science and technology organisations.

This study examines technology transfer in the Nigerian oil industry, focusing on how the Nigerian National Petroleum Company acquires technologies and accumulates technological capabilities. It examines the training efforts used to master imported technologies and looks at how technical change affects the company's production and financial performance.

This paper examines how trade helps transfer knowledge to emerging economies. It reviews existing research and uses an analysis of patent statistics to track the spread of knowledge across 18 countries involved in bilateral trade.

The author argues that trade helps transfer technology across both countries and sectors, as seen by the positive relationship between trade activity and number of cites to foreign patents. But, he says, the extent to which knowledge is disseminated depends on cultural and historical proximities and the local technical capacity of acquiring countries.

This article examines the ways in which development aid is conceived and represented.

It presents the initial concept of technical assistance, and describes how it has shifted to include a more equal and interactive relationship between the giver and receiver in what is known as technical 'cooperation'.

The author also discusses the recent influence that knowledge management and innovation systems concepts have had on development assistance discourse and practice.

He adds that another shift is needed to incorporate situations where technology transfer stakeholders can jointly create knowledge, moving from a 'learning from' environment to a 'learning with' one.

This policy brief examines the importance of investment promotion agencies (IPAs), which endorse specific countries or locations to investors, in stimulating foreign direct investment (FDI). It discusses how policy incentives impact FDI and emphasises the importance of promoting investment opportunities in specific industries and businesses to match the interests of both the investors and the receiving country.

The brief describes the institutional characteristics of IPAs and considers how both their position within governments and their level of autonomy influence their ability to attract FDI. It concludes that an IPA's effectiveness depends on its political visibility, as well as on broader resources in the receiving country like market size, human capital and science and technology infrastructure.

The role of developing countries in climate change mitigation has been and continues to be a contentious issue. Developing countries' emissions are predicted to surpass those of industrialised countries within the first half of this century, but no formal commitments to reduce emissions have been made.

This report, prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, examines six countries — Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey — in the context of climate change mitigation. Ongoing efforts in these countries have helped reduce emissions, though not necessarily in the name of mitigating climate change.

The authors find that overall, over the past three decades, these countries have reduced the growth rate of their emissions by 300 million tonnes. The motivations for such efforts include poverty alleviation, economic development, energy security and local environmental protection. This demonstrates that climate change mitigation can and does occur in the context of development that aims to be sustainable.

This report is comprehensive for the countries studied. It is very accessible and likely to be of interest to anyone engaged in the debate about mitigation in the South.

The report is available in pdf format only. An executive summary is availably online here.

This policy brief, prepared for the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), addresses the new agendas for policy in agricultural research as well as the institutional innovations that are emerging to address these agendas. The brief begins by outlining the origin of existing agricultural research systems in developing countries, and their original objectives. It then highlights the new policy agendas in agricultural research, such as poverty, environment, stakeholder participation, public-private partnerships and balanced research agendas, covering both novel research and efforts to adapt to existing technologies. It then addresses the types of policy responses and institutional innovations that have emerged in response to these new policy issues. Finally, the paper suggests how to analyse the institutional roles and relationships in agricultural research, and looks into the possible development of an Indian agricultural innovation system.

There is growing recognition by the international community that developing countries need to obtain access to technologies via transfer from developed countries to be able to comply with the conditions set in a variety of international agreements. As a consequence, special provisions on technology transfers and capacity building have been incorporated in around 80 international agreements and several regional and bilateral instruments. This compendium prepared by UNCTAD summarises of existing provisions on technology transfer in multilateral, regional and bilateral agreements.

It states that although some progress has been made in implementing the provisions expressed in the agreements, a major gap remains between the intentions and their actual implementation. Therefore, the compendium intends to act as a reminder of the broad range of further policy that is necessary to reach the technology transfer objectives set in those commitments.

This paper by Linsu Kim contains an overview of South Korea's technological development and focuses on the interplay between technology transfer via various means such as licenses, reverse engineering and domestic technological learning efforts. The paper draws lessons on the impact of intellectual property rights on technological and economic development.

The paper confirms the findings of other recent studies that the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on technology transfer and technological development will differ according to the levels of technological and economic development of different countries. The author concludes that there are four main lessons from the South Korean experience: first, strong IPRs will hamper rather than facilitate technology transfer and domestic learning in the initial stage of development when learning is based on reverse engineering and duplicative imitation of foreign technologies. Second, IPR protection only becomes a relevant element in technology transfer when countries have developed considerable domestic capabilities. Third, in order to contribute to development, the enforcement of IPRs should be differentiated according to level of economic development of countries and different industrial sectors. Fourth, developing countries should strive to change standardised multilateral IPR regimes and to guarantee more favourable IPR policies to them, while making efforts to enhance their absorptive capacity.

This paper has been prepared for the UNCTAD/ICTSD Capacity Building Project on Intellectual Property Rights and Sustainable Development by Sanjaya Lall from Oxford University. The paper discusses the impact of the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) — interpreted by the author as the tightening of intellectual property rights — on industrial and technological development, including technology transfers via foreign direct investment, capital goods imports and reverse engineering in developing countries.

The paper concludes that the jury is still out on the benefits of TRIPS for technological development in developing countries as a whole. It notes that there are significant variations both between rich and poor countries and among developing countries themselves in the factors — such as domestic technological effort, imports of foreign technology and industrial performance — that may affect the impact of TRIPS on technological development. Therefore, the application of TRIPS should take a differentiated approach according to the economic and technological differences among countries.

This paper analyses the benefits for acquiring countries of transfers of technology through foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper focuses on the conditions (or their absence) under which the impact of FDI for economic and technological development are most beneficial for acquiring economies.

The authors assert that FDI does not necessarily have a positive impact on economic development and productivity growth. This is due to the fact that acquiring countries cannot draw on the largest part of the benefits deriving from FDI in the absence of a certain level of domestic absorptive capacities.

Anabel Marin and Martin Bell analyse technology spillovers from foreign direct investments (FDI) in acquring countries and look at the case of Argentina during the 1990s.

The paper questions the conventional wisdom on technology spillovers from FDI which portrays multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries as a passive actor in the process. According to these conventional perspectives, the local subsidiary of MNC only serves as a 'leaky' container between the parent firm, the originator of new technologies and the technology transfer pipeline, and the domestic firms absorbing these technologies via spillovers. This paper suggests that, contrary to these views, a substantial part of the potential for technology spillovers is generated within local subsidiaries of foreign companies themselves as a result of their own knowledge-creating activities in the acquiring country.

This paper, by Sanjaya Lall of the University of Oxford, provides a general review of the emerging policy and research issues related to foreign direct investment (FDI) and development in the current context of rapid technological change and policy liberalisation. It deals with the benefits and costs of FDI to development and the market failures that affect their impact on developing countries. It focuses on the impact of FDI on local enterprise development, particularly technological development, static versus dynamic benefits and bargaining with transnational corporations (TNCs).

The paper notes that FDI and TNCs are one way for developing countries to obtain access to technologies, skills and other benefits, but this does not mean that simply 'opening up' to FDI is the best way of obtaining them. Acquiring countries' governments face many trade-offs and there is no 'ideal' policy on FDI that applies to all countries at all times. The author argue that the extent to which TNCs upgrade their technology and skill transfer and raise local capabilities and linkages depends on the interaction of four factors: the trade and competition regime of acquiring countries; their government policies on TNC operations; the corporate strategy and resources of the TNC; and development and responsiveness of local factor markets and institutions.

This paper prepared for the World Bank addresses different modes of technology transfer for individual firms in developing countries, the determinants of the demand for and productivity of technology transfers and reviews the evidence from case studies of technology transfers and technological learning in developing countries.

The paper notes that firms in developing countries can access new technology through various channels such as imports of new equipment, licensing agreements, consultancy, flows of people, and so on. The author emphasises two factors that influence the demand for technology transfers and the potential of transferred technologies to increase productivity. The first of these factors is the policy environment in which firms operate and the second is firms' efforts and capacities to seek, absorb and assimilate new technologies.