The International Transfer of technology. A Literature Review and a Critique

• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, António Carrizo
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/ei.v0i1/2/3.6865

The technology transfer debate has clearly changed with time. Originally, the transfer of technology was at the centre of the debate for most governments/host-states engaged in international technology transactions (ITT). The essential point in ITT was the unequal distribution of power and influence between different countries in the world. Technological power was at the heart of these inequalities, because it was almost monopolised by most of the industrial countries. More recently, with the globalisation process the international economy is going through the unequal distribution of power among different countries has diminished its importance and firm's specific factors are becoming much more important in the technology transaction dimension. The different aspects of ITT have been emphasised by the literature, namely, the issue of the nation state, firm-level activity, and the evaluation of the technology's contribution to the recipient country's social and economic development. Although these issues are useful, they fail to explain how the horizontal dimensions - home country, host country and the technology transaction might influence ITT. As technology transfer cannot be isolated from its international perspective the horizontal dimension is going to be used to provide an overview of the ITT process regarding the impact of the ITT on host and home countries and the importance of the transaction perspective. In the final part of the paper the new perspective, based on the multinationals' behaviour, is presented and confronted with the horizontal dimension.