ABSTRACT
The reservoirs of technological knowledge are many, deep and distant. Economists have reasonably good ideas of what is meant by excellence in production and exchange, centring on efficiency in the static sense and on innovation and responsiveness in the dynamic sense, but they have few ideas of what is meant by excellence in the transfer of technological knowledge. Economic data on costs and prices; financial data on sources and uses of funds; personal data on backgrounds and employment; institutional data on negotiations and agreements; and general technical data on products and processes were made available in detail whenever they were requested. The sources of the technological knowledge were firms in the developed countries, specifically the United States, Japan and West Germany; the firms that utilised the imported techniques are scattered about Korea. The academic literature appears in four overlapping fields commonly designated as ‘technology transfer’, ‘appropriate technology’, ‘the multi-nationals’ and ‘science policy’.
