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This paper explores China's competitive threat to Latin America in trade in manufactured goods. The direct threat to exports to third country markets appears small: Latin America and the Caribbean's (LAC's) trade structure is largely complementary to that of China. In bilateral trade, several LAC countries are increasing primary and resource-based exports to China. However, the pattern of trade, with LAC specializing increasingly in resource-based products and China in manufactured goods, seems worrying. Given cumulative capability building, China's success in increasingly technology-based products with strong learning externalities can place it on a higher growth path than specialization in "simpler" goods, as in LAC. China may thus affect LAC's technological upgrading in exports and industrial production. The issue is not so much current competition as the "spaces" open for LAC in the emerging technology-based world.

Disillusionment with the role of governments in development has cast doubt on the role of interventions to promote industrialization. Industrial policy is increasingly constrained by this experience and donor pressure. This paper argues that neither the theory of market failure nor the evidence of successful industrialization justifies the present neoliberal stance. The "capabilities" approach to industrial development shows the need for interventions. The experiences of the East Asian NIEs, two Latin American countries and Ghana illustrate the successes and failures of industrial policy. The paper closes with a critique of the World Bank's study of the Asian economic "miracle."

This paper reviews briefly the economic case for uniform and strong intellectual property rights (IPRs) in developing countries and to throw some empirical light on the potential impact of strengthening IPRs and applying them uniformly to all countries (as envisaged by the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement). It argues that countries at different levels of industrial and technological development face very different economic costs and benefits from stronger IPRs. It illustrates technological differences with the help of country classifications using various measures of domestic innovation and technology imports, both of which are expected to respond to stricter IPRs. The data can be used to examine the technological implications of stricter IPRs. The paper does not, however, deal with such IPR issues as the cost of medicines, agricultural inputs, bio-diversity or genetic materials. Nor does it try to measure the strength of IPR regimes in different countries or quantify the general impact of IPRs on development.

This update on transfer of technology in the Asian-Pacific region takes the original survey (Enos 1989) as its model, dealing in some detail with vehicles for technology transfer, more summarily with types of technology transferred. In conclusion, this article draws attention to some issues neglected in the literature and raises the question whether, in the prevailing world political climate of deregulation, the issue of transfer of technology will remain in the political arena.