Issue 21: November-December 2002

Book analyses government
role in promoting innovation

The changing role of government in domestic technology development is analysed in a new book by Sunil Mani, head of the graduate studies programme at UNU Institute for New Technologies (UNU/INTECH).

In Government, Innovation and Technology Policy: and International Comparative Analysis, Mani provides a new framework for understanding government efforts to promote innovation and technological change by examining the experiences of eight countries in the developed and developing worlds. He draws a distinction between countries which create new technologies – Japan, Korea and Israel – and those with the potential to create those technologies – Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Africa and Brazil.

The book details the policy measure each country uses to stimulate investment in research and development. Mani concludes that financial instruments such as tax incentives and research grants will not succeed without an accompanying emphasis on non-fiscal measures especially human resource development.

Assessing the quality of FDI

Former UNU/INTECH research fellow Nagesh Kumar has written Globalization and the Quality of Foreign Direct Investment, a book designed to help policy makers look beyond mere volume of FDI inflows and focus on their capacity to promote development and other favourable outcomes.

The book uses analytic models with structural, geopolitical, and policy factors as determinants to explain the patterns of quantity and quality of inflows across countries, broad sectors of industry and over time.

INTECH director Lynn Mytelka says the book is "rich in guidance on how to strengthen the attractiveness of developing countries for quality foreign investments and how to design the kinds of foreign investment policies that would do so".

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