Symmetry and Asymmetry in International Science and Technology Activities

Development assistance is by nature an asymmetric relationship, as relatively affluent countries provides funding for relatively poor nations. The former tend to feel that "he who pays the piper calls the tune". The latter feel that they know better what needs to be done  and what works or does not work in their own countries.

After World War II, the United States was by far the most economically productive nation in the world. European nations and Japan recovered in a couple of decades, and joined in the club of economically developed nations. Over the past decades some once-poor nations have converged economically with the United States and other developed nations, while some nations have remained in poverty traps. There remain a number of middle income countries, neither affluent nor poor. Economic relations with these middle income countries remain asymmetric, but can be more collaborative than in the form of development assistance.

Asymmetric relations are also common in science and technology. The United States is the world's strongest scientific and technological power. We are relatively stronger in the biomedical sciences than in other S&T fields, but we are quite strong across the board. Following World War II, the United States represented more than half the world's scientific production and was comparably strong technologically. Over the decades, Japan has come to spend proportionately more of its GDP on research and development than does the United States, Europe has risen to comparable power in S&T to the United States, while a number of countries remain spending a very small portion of their small GDPs on research and development. However, a number of countries now populate a middle range in science and technology, and among them countries such as China, India and Brazil are increasing S&T capacity rapidly.

Thus U.S. scientific and technological relations with other nations will range from extremely asymmetric to symmetric, from aid to collaboration including mixed aid and cooperation approaches. Note too that scientific and technological capacity development and economic development are closely correlated, and both are correlated with social development.

U.S. foreign policy has, I think, focused both on collaborative relations with economically and political powerful countries and development assistance for poor countries, including humanitarian assistance for the poorest countries. I would suggest that there should also be a strong focus on relations with the countries in the intermediate range.

Science and technology can be an effective area for collaboration and for assistance. Thus they have a role in our relations with countries across the spectrum of development of foreign countries. However, the nature of the the scientific and technological linkages will depend on the degree of asymmetry. For example, I would suggest that private sector technological activities would be strongest with developed and emerging economies, but would be limited with the least developed nations because of their lack of S&T capacity.

It seems to me that it might be useful now to have a new agency to promote S&T activities with countries in the middle range. Such an agency might promote a mix of collaborative arrangements in Government supported and implemented R&D, training of foreign S&T students in American universities, increasing private sector technology activities, and some areas of S&T assistance and capacity building.

For the poorest countries, in which the S&T relations are most asymmetric, I think the focus should be on building S&T capacity and on focusing a portion of U.S. S&T capacity on solving problems that these countries can not solve for themselves. Importantly, some of the S&T capacity will have to be conceptualized as shared among poor countries. Thus the very poor nations of Sub-Saharan Africa and the very small nations of the Caribbean will probably have to collaboratively develop S&T institutions within their regions which they will share.