A tale of two cities

The authors are respectively parttime professor sociology at the University of Texas (San Antonio) as well as lecturer at the medical faculty of the State University Limburg (section psychiatry) and researcher at the Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Justice, Schedeldoekshaven 100, 2511 EX The Hague, The Netherlands. Dorette Courtar, a mobility programme exchange student at the University of Maastricht and the Stockholm University, assisted in the basic research. We would like to thank Paulina Loennroth and the mayor of Hulst, dr. A.A.L.G.M. Kessen, both connected to the ECAD and Paul Vasseur, Urban Weber, Suzanne Schardt, all connected to the ECDP for their information and comments.     

Fresh Thinking on U.S. Engagement with Africa: Probing the Limits of Engagement

The Biden administration faces the opportunity to reset U.S. policy towards Africa and possesses a variety of tools to use in doing so, including traditional diplomacy, economic statecraft, development assistance, and military engagement. With the increased militarization of U.S. foreign policy over the past few decades, there is an unfortunate tendency to default to military engagement when confronted with even remote threats to U.S. national security interests, and Africa is no exception. With vital security interests in Africa, it can be argued that military engagement should be limited in its application and targeted to those situations that do not lend themselves to solution through traditional diplomacy or development assistance.     

The relation between technology import and domestic R&D

The relation between domestic R&D and imports of technology is examined for 10 countries. Simple regressions revealed strong complementarity for each of the countries. Multiple regressions including GNP per capita and number of scientists and engineers were performed for the five countries with time series for all the variables. Strong complementarity was found between technology imports and domestic R&D and other variables for Japan and South Korea, weak for France, none for Germany and the US. Excluding government-financed R&D in the US resulted in a substitutive relation. Japan revealed a sharp decline in the ratio of technology payments to R&D spending; Korea is following in its steps. Complementarity appears to weaken in later stages as technology development strategies shift from dependent to imitative to autonomous or offensive technology development.