ABSTRACT
Technology is, in turn, one of the most fundamental drivers of social and economic development. Development is a highly complex and only partially understood process. The importance of factors highlights the critical importance of trade in promoting flows of ideas, technologies and capital, and thereby in underpinning development. The true significance of this fundamental divide can be seen in the markedly different responses to the same factors in the changing external environment. Each radical innovation, incremental improvement and/or new deployment of technology both enables and spurs further phases of economic and technological change, in a positive reciprocating dynamic. The logic underpinning the current process of market liberalisation and the rapid and dynamic changes currently reshaping the external environment is the principle of comparative advantage. The most fundamental point, however, is that the principle of comparative advantage only works, in practice, if economies actually restructure around the most valuable activities they can achieve.
