Cooperation Treaties and Their Impact on Transfer of Technology

This article tries to examine Cooperation Treaties and their impact on the transfer of technology. To this end, the study distinguished between two types of cooperation agreements: those which, because of their indirect effect on technology acquisition, are considered as passive, and those active ones, which have a direct impact on the transfer of technology. The first kind varied on their object and purpose. The most used and popular type of this group of arrangements were the bilateral and multilateral foreign investment agreements. Having examined them, we found that there was no causal relation between those and the transfer of technology. Instead, as available evidences suggested factors such as economic and political stability, national legislation and local market capacity were more powerful than the treaties in attracting foreign capital and technology. Yet, our conclusion was rather optimistic as we believed that such arrangements could have some positive impact although minor and time-consuming on the acquisition of technology. As to the second type of governmental cooperation, our finding was quite different. Accordingly, there wasa causal link between the two with some major limitations. Some of these limitations were germane to the conditions under which the donor country required the receiving one to apply (e.g. tied-aid) and some were related to the policy of the former in limiting such cooperation to the extent that it would not impair its competitive and comparative advantages at the regional and global level. The other obstacles were the failure of the receiving state in devoting the requisite resources to the acquisition of technology and the enhancement of its technological capacity. The lack of appropriate governancein the host country was also another impeding factor in attracting the necessary foreign technology.