Science Policy and Development Strategy in Developing Countries

Abstract

In recent years problems of science policy have acquired a prominent place and have led to growing interest among social scientists in discovering the relationships between scientific research, technical progress and economic growth. The marriage of scientific research with physical production, which characterises present economic development and current changes in world economic relationships, has clearly shown the short-comings of the tools of economic growth analysis. The introduction of a residual term ‘technical progress’ in production functions and the magnitude of this residual term, which has been found to be greater than that of both capital and labour together, was merely the recognition of the fact that the predictive power of equations derived from past performance of national economies and their various sectors, has in fact been unpredictable.

The author is Associate Professor of the Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade. At the time of the conference he was temporarily occupying the post of Director of Planning in Zambia under the U.N. OPAS Programme. This paper draws much on the material presented in Vol. I of A Study of the Needs for Scientific Research and Advancement of Technology in relation to the Economic Development of Yugoslavia (1969), undertaken in co-operation with the Department of Scientific Affairs, O.E.C.D. The author was Project Director of that Study.