The task … is to restructure existing relationships between suppliers and recipients of technology so as to facilitate the Third World’s access to the accumulated promise of mankind’s scientific and technological achievements.
Developed countries have offered the example of industrial societies based upon technology and the fruits of technological endeavour. The result has been that the process of effectively transferring technology is now widely perceived as an indispensible element for improving the economic lot of less advantaged nations. Less developed countries (LDCs) have recognized that the existing legal mechanisms and practices for the transfer of technology, established predominantly by public and private actors in advanced economies, have not served their interests and, indeed, may have prejudiced their efforts to acquire an indigenous technological capability which would enable them to achieve their primary objective of independent economic development. Thus the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has undertaken the negotiation and drafting of an International Code of Conduct with a view to redressing the apparent inequities of the system as presently constituted. With diplomatically phrased understatement, an early UNCTAD report on the task ahead observed that “transactions involving the transfer of technology have occurred in a manner which has not produced entirely satisfactory results for developing countries.”