International Dependencies in Science and Technology

When colonies across Asia and Africa won their freedom in the decades after World War II, the mood was hopeful. Political independence, many leaders assumed, would naturally translate into economic prosperity and the ability to catch up with the industrial West. Decades later, that expectation has only been partly fulfilled. While a handful of nations have made dramatic leaps, most developing countries still depend heavily on the industrial world for the science and technology that drives modern economies. This relationship of technological dependence sits at the heart of how power is distributed in international relations today.

How science and technology created global dependencies 🔗

Technology is not just a collection of machines or formulas. It is a package of scientific knowledge, managerial skill, and marketing know-how that builds on itself over time. Countries that industrialized first accumulated this knowledge over centuries, giving them a structural head start. When newly independent nations tried to modernize, they found that the most advanced technology was owned and controlled by firms and governments in the industrial North.

This created an uneven relationship. Developing countries needed advanced technology to grow, but they could rarely produce it themselves. So they imported it, often at high cost and on terms set by the seller. Multinational corporations, which hold much of the world’s cutting-edge technology, have little incentive to simply give away their most valuable asset. As one analysis for the Council of Europe put it, nations of the South are increasingly left relying on foreign direct investment by companies for their long-term technological and economic development.

The roots in dependency theory 🔗

Scholars in the 1960s and 1970s developed dependency theory to explain why poorer nations stayed poor. The theory divides the world into a wealthy “core” and a dependent “periphery.” According to thinkers like Andre Gunder Frank, the economic weakness of peripheral countries results from the continued extraction of their resources and labour, which enriches the core while keeping the periphery underdeveloped. Technology was central to this argument: the core controlled innovation, patents, and high-value industries, while the periphery supplied raw materials and cheap labour.

A recurring criticism is that dependency sometimes meant the transfer of outdated technology. Dominant states would deposit obsolete technologies into developing countries, while the genuine breakthroughs and productivity gains continued to occur in the advanced economies. This left the least developed countries trapped in a cycle of industrial backwardness, always one step behind.

The North-South dialogue and the call for a new order 🔗

By the early 1970s, frustration in the developing world had reached a boiling point. Newly independent states organized themselves into coalitions to demand change. The most important of these were the Group of 77 (G77) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which gave the developing world a collective voice in global forums. This collective negotiation between the industrial North and the developing South became known as the North-South dialogue.

The demands crystallized in 1974, when the UN General Assembly adopted the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO was a set of proposals to restructure the global economy so it would no longer favour the nations that built it. The founding document openly acknowledged that the existing system was created when most developing countries did not even exist as independent states and therefore perpetuated inequality.

What the developing world actually wanted 🔗

The NIEO and the accompanying Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States packaged together a broad set of demands. The core elements included:

Better trade terms: A fairer relationship between the prices of raw materials exported by developing countries and the prices of manufactured goods they imported. Developing nations wanted stable, higher earnings from their commodity exports.

Technology transfer: Access to advanced technology on concessional terms, including the sharing of intellectual property and technical assistance, so that the South could industrialize rather than remain a permanent buyer.

Sovereignty over resources: The right to control and even nationalize their own natural resources and to regulate the multinational corporations operating within their borders.

Greater participation: A larger and more meaningful voice in the global economic institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, where decision-making power was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy.

These ideas were not invented from nowhere. The UN had already created the Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 to give developing nations an institutional platform to push for fairer terms of trade and greater cooperation.

Why the grand vision mostly failed 🔗

Despite the energy behind it, the NIEO largely faded by the 1980s and early 1990s. Several forces worked against it. The most important was a simple lack of leverage: the South was asking the North to voluntarily give up advantages, and there was little to compel the wealthy nations to agree.

Developed countries were reluctant to surrender power or resources. When the world economy slowed in the 1980s, industrial nations turned inward to address their own problems of slow growth and unemployment, and the momentum behind the NIEO collapsed. At the same time, internal challenges within many developing countries, including weak governance and limited administrative capacity, made it harder to use what assistance did arrive effectively.

The technology gap proved especially stubborn. Even today, the North dominates technological innovation and holds the majority of the world’s patents and intellectual property rights. Foreign direct investment, which carries technology and capital, continues to flow disproportionately toward already-developed economies rather than toward the nations that need it most.

India’s partial success story 🔗

The picture is not entirely bleak, and India offers one of the most encouraging examples. Despite being a developing economy with all its associated problems, India built a serious technological capability in two key areas: space and information technology.

Building a space programme from scratch 🔗

India’s space journey began modestly. In 1963, parts of the country’s first rocket were famously transported to the launch site on a bicycle. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was formed in 1969, and the government created the Department of Space in 1972 with the explicit mandate of promoting space technology to achieve self-reliance and assist in the all-round development of the nation.

The strategy was deliberate. Rather than depend permanently on foreign launches, India developed its own launch vehicles, including the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). This let the country build and orbit its own communication and remote-sensing satellites for television broadcasting, weather forecasting, disaster warnings, and managing natural resources. India’s approach is now seen as a practical blueprint for emerging space nations because it focused on delivering tangible benefits with limited resources rather than trying to match the wealthy in every field.

Crucially, the early years still involved dependence. India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, was built domestically but launched by the Soviet Union in 1975. The country gradually mastered the imported knowledge and then built indigenous alternatives, which is exactly how meaningful technological catch-up tends to happen.

Riding the information technology wave 🔗

India’s second major success came in software and information services. Where many developing nations struggled to break into manufacturing dominated by the North, India found a niche in IT services and software exports, becoming a globally competitive player in a knowledge-intensive industry. This turned the country into a notable example of high-tech industrialization in the developing world.

Yet even success contains a paradox. Research on India and Taiwan notes that the rise of knowledge-based industries can ironically make these countries more dependent technologically in some respects, because the gap in fundamental research and patent filings between them and the leading industrial powers has continued to widen rather than close.

The rise of the Newly Industrialized Countries 🔗

If India shows partial success, the East Asian “Tigers” present the most powerful challenge to the idea that the South is doomed to permanent dependence. The Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs), particularly South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, transformed themselves from poor, peripheral economies into wealthy, technologically advanced ones within a single generation.

Their rise directly contradicted the gloomier predictions of dependency theory. These nations did not isolate themselves from the global economy; instead, they plugged into it strategically. South Korea and Taiwan succeeded not just by managing imported foreign technology but by building a dynamic indigenous base of innovation of their own. Active state policy, investment in education, and an export-oriented strategy turned technology into a genuine engine of growth.

This shift suggests a movement away from one-sided dependence toward something closer to mutual interdependence. A country like South Korea, home to global electronics giants, is no longer merely a recipient of Northern technology; the relationship is more balanced. Their example also helped scholars rethink development, shifting attention from the costs of dependence toward the idea of “catching up” and even “technological leapfrogging.”

Why the gap still persists 🔗

The NIC success stories are real but exceptional. For most of the developing world, the overall economic and technological gap has not closed. Even within global electronics supply chains, much of the high-value work, design, and profit still flows to parent companies in the United States, Japan, and other advanced economies, while developing countries often contribute the lower-value labour and assembly.

Importing technology without building domestic capacity can actually deepen dependence rather than reduce it. As recent development analysis points out, high-tech solutions designed in the North often fail when parachuted into low-capacity contexts because they are out of sync with local realities like unreliable electricity, weak infrastructure, or a shortage of skilled operators.

Dependence on global technological systems 🔗

One of the clearest illustrations of ongoing dependence is the world’s reliance on shared technological infrastructure, especially communication satellites. Global communications, navigation, weather monitoring, and broadcasting all depend on satellite networks and the systems that support them. Building, launching, and operating these systems requires enormous capital and advanced expertise that most developing nations simply do not possess.

This creates a structural dependence that goes beyond any single product. A nation may use satellite data daily for agriculture, disaster management, or telecommunications, yet have no control over the technology that makes it possible. This is precisely why international cooperation matters. Joint missions show a more balanced path forward: India’s collaboration with the United States on the NISAR earth-observation satellite, launched in 2025, is an example of developing technology jointly in areas of common interest rather than one side simply selling to the other.

From confrontation to cooperation 🔗

The story of science, technology, and international dependence has shifted over time. The confrontational demands of the NIEO era have given way to newer approaches, including South-South cooperation, where developing countries share technology and expertise among themselves rather than relying solely on the North. As new economic powers emerge in the South, a model of South-South technology transfer is gaining momentum, slowly reshaping a landscape that was once strictly one-directional.

Still, the fundamental tension remains. Technology continues to concentrate wealth and power, and closing the gap requires not just access to machines but the deeper investment in education, institutions, and indigenous research that allowed the East Asian Tigers to succeed. The challenge for the coming decades is whether more nations can repeat that journey, and whether global cooperation can make the playing field a little more even.

What do you think? Does the success of countries like South Korea and India prove that technological dependence can be overcome through smart national strategy, or are these exceptions that simply hide a deeper, persistent gap between the rich and poor nations of the world? And in an age where artificial intelligence and advanced computing are the new frontier, will the technology gap widen even further, or could it finally give latecomers a chance to leap ahead?

References

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