Technology and economic development

Technical change is central to the process of economic development. As defined in this Part, technical change refers to improvements in the transformation of inputs into outputs, including improvements in the quality of output. Such improvements are an integral part of the process of economic growth which in turn is necessary for the broader process of economic development.

However, despite the centrality of technical change, the phenomenon itself is still poorly understood. This emerges as clearly in the literature on the industrialised countries as it in that pertaining to the Third World. In a book significantly titled Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Rosenberg concludes regarding the question 'of the social determinants of a society's capacity for generating technical progress in the first place' that 'on this most fundamental issue, our understanding remains, at best, rudimentary' (Rosenberg, 1982: 29).