Science and Technology as Sources of Economic Growth in the Information-Based Economy
Science and technology play a critical role as sources of economic productivity and competitiveness in the new, informational economy (Monk 1989). Furthermore, the growing interdependence of service activities with manufacturing and agriculture place information processing at the core of productivity growth (Hall and Preston 1988). Thus, dramatic innovation in information technologies in the last two decades has made technological capacity even more crucial for economic development and political power. Because the adequate use of advanced information technologies is highly dependent upon the general level of education and culture of labor, there is a growing connection between people's intellectual skills and their countries' development potential (Carnoy and others 1982).
This analysis is not limited to market economies. The groundbreaking econometric studies by Soviet economist Aganbegyan (1989) show that the decline of the Soviet economy from 1971 to 1985 (which ultimately forced the policy of perestroika) was linked to the exhaustion of the extensive model of growth, through massive addition of labor and physical resources, as the Soviet economy became more complex and needed improved technology and better management to perform in the next stage of development. This next stage was characterized by the importance of information generation and information processing outside the secluded military industrial complex.
However, some authors argue that less developed economies are less concerned about advanced technology as much of their activity is still linked to traditional agriculture, semi-industrial handicraft production, and petty trade. Besides, advanced technologies tend to be labor saving, while the major problem in developing countries is to create jobs for a population still growing at an excessive rate. Yet, this argument forgets that today the world is closely interconnected, and that the process of development does not proceed stage by stage, but must instead be based on the proper linkages between national and regional economies with very different technological compositions (see Geledan 1990).
The informational economy is also a world economy, in which comparative advantages in terms of labor costs only become important once a given national economy is connected to the rest of the system on the basis of a sufficient level of communications, productive infrastructure, and labor skills (see Sewell and Tucker 1988). Because of the growing interpenetration of economic processes worldwide, economies that try to reach out beyond the subsistence level (thus generating some surplus) will immediately face a highly sophisticated international economy in which technological capacity is a critical variable. Unless we adopt the ideological position of full self-sufficiency, which would be hard to implement for political reasons in a world linked by television and tourist travel (Castells and Laserna 1989), the informational economy must be considered a worldwide phenomenon, with an asymmetrical structure, in which countries and regions are integrated at very different levels, furthering the system's segmentation and aggravating societies' contradictions (Ohmae 1990). In such a worldwide, informational economy we must rethink the meaning and instruments of development (see Portes and Kincaid 1990). It would seem that investment in what is called "human capital". becomes strategic, but the concrete policy implications of such a statement are more complex and less accepted than would appear at first sight.
This chapter elaborates on one of these implications: universities (but not any kind of university) become fundamental tools of development. However, they do so in a very different way to the old humanistic approach to development in terms of improving literacy and fulfilling the developing world's cultural needs.
The science and technology systems of the new economy (including, of course, the humanities) are equivalent to the factories of the industrial age. Not that manufacturing will disappear, but the new manufacturing of the twenty-first century (as well as agriculture and advanced services) will only be able to perform on the basis of a new, highly developed cultural, scientific, and technological system (Cohen and Zysman 1986).
If knowledge is the electricity of the new informational international economy, then institutions of higher education are the power sources on which the new development process must rely. This is the central proposition of this chapter.
