IE WP 01/03 Technology transfer and sustainable development in emerging economies

This paper aims to show how the process of diffusion of 'clean technologies' confronts a variety of forces at the macro level that create systematic, technological and institutional barriers to their adoption. There is abundant literature on the role of technology transfer in the development of emerging economies, but this perspective is clearly new. What needs to be borne in mind is the possibility that the transferred dominant technology may be subject to a techno- institutional lock-in at its source that does not allow the diffusion of environmentally superior alternative technologies.