Technology and science policies provide some of the most difficult
decisions for a small country to make. It is also an area of choice that
holds considerable promise for development. The barriers are difficult
because frontier research is so costly and the knowledge base for
effective use of technology is so large, that it is difficult for small, poor
countries to gain access, even when the efficient scale of utilization is not
prohibitively large. It is promising because science and technology have
demonstrated the capability of allowing countries to overcome limitations
of economic backwardness and limited resource endowment.
For awhile, the belief was prevalent that smallness in technology was the
answer to the problems of poor and/or small countries. Small was
beautiful! Small was renewable and sustainable. Small was eventually seen
as a solution to the economic and environmental problems of countries of
all sizes. To some observers, the self -evident virtues of smallness were
based on the principles of biology and physics. In the economy of
the global village, there is no small country problem.peer-reviewe
