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‘Nigeria, others account for 0.3 per cent of world’s high-tech products exports’

By Femi Adekoya
30 December 2015   |   3:50 am
Report seeks innovation, technology-driven industrial policies <em With an 18 percentage point rise in its global exports of high technology since 2000, developing countries accounted for 52 per cent of global exports of high technology products in 2014, even as African countries continue to lag behind, representing just 0.3 per cent of this total, latest…

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Report seeks innovation, technology-driven industrial policies
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With an 18 percentage point rise in its global exports of high technology since 2000, developing countries accounted for 52 per cent of global exports of high technology products in 2014, even as African countries continue to lag behind, representing just 0.3 per cent of this total, latest UNCTAD Technology and Innovation Report has stated.

The report, subtitled Fostering Innovation Policies for Industrial Development, examines how Africa’s governments can better implement science, technology and innovation policies, and coordinates them with industrial policies and industrial development plans.

The report found that, mainly because of difficulties in coordinating those two policy frameworks, even African countries that spend more on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) do not manage to export more high- and medium-technology products.

Similarly, the report provides in depth analyses of industrial and science, technology and innovation policies in Ethiopia, Nigeria and the United Republic of Tanzania, along with regional trends and initiatives in policies in other African countries.

The report shows that patterns of policy conceptualisation, design, planning and implementation are critical to the success of companies and hold the key to making technology work for business.

According to UNCTAD, recent studies have shown that it is not enough to just have a policy emphasis on technology-led growth; instead, the success of policies depends on how policy processes work to facilitate collaboration and cooperation between policy agencies, companies, businesses and research.

UNCTAD noted that policymakers need to formulate industrial policies not as a standalone framework but in coherence with other policies, like the innovation policy.

“As subjects of the study, the Ethiopia, Nigeria and the United Republic of Tanzania were chosen for their differing economic profiles: while Nigeria is an oil-rich developing country, Ethiopia is a least developed country with a resource-concentration in agriculture, mainly coffee. These countries are juxtaposed with the United Republic of Tanzania, which has a mix of resource-based activities and other sectors. Thus, each country serves to illustrate a developmental challenge in the realm of coordination of industrial and innovation policies for developmental outcomes.

“Each country also has national vision documents, new industrial development strategies and science, technology and innovation policies that embody the aspiration of their Governments to transform the nations into middle-income economies within the next two to three decades.

“In addition, all three countries had relatively impressive GDP growth rates over the past decade, if not longer, and increased research and development expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the 2000s. Despite this, they have faced difficulties in focusing those investments into greater technological learning, particularly in firms, as demonstrated by the lack of medium- and higher-technology products in their exports.

“Almost all countries in Africa, including the three countries that were studied, and more generally in the developing world, are currently at a developmental stage where industrial development through technological change should be a central, if not the most important, priority. Not only is there a policy transition in that direction, the field surveys showed the extensive degree of political commitment to enacting elaborate industrial policy frameworks and revising science, technology and innovation policies towards innovation”, UNCTAD explained.

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