Under the impetus of strong forces of globalization, the world is today dominated by a market-oriented economy. But while many countries lack the policies or infrastructure to support market-oriented mechanisms for building their exports or their productive economic assets, not to mention their S&T capacity. While the specifics vary, there are points in common in many developing nations that enable the Study Panel to highlight in this report some areas of special attention.

The industrialized, S&T-advanced countries undoubtedly have concerns about balancing the public and private domains, improving the quality of their educational systems, attracting and retaining talent in S&T fields, or the manner in which national investments in research and development (R&D) can be optimized. Yet for the Study Panel, as it surveys the scene across the globe, it is clear that the starkest problem facing the world and the international scientific community is the large and growing gap between the industrialized nations and the less-developed countries. As we move toward a knowledge-based economy, some 80 percent of humanity are deprived of the opportunity to contribute to knowledge and instead are relegated to consumption of the resulting technology. Furthermore, many new technologies will not be consumable in developing nations without a powerful local capacity in the science and engineering that underlie them.

The industrialized nations have an interest in supporting the expansion of S&T capacity in the developing world. Their citizens cannot remain safe and prosperous in a world containing large numbers of failed states. Expansion of science and technology also helps in building markets, promoting stability, and enhancing trade. For the developing nations, creating the local capacity for enhanced cooperation with industrialized nations allows them to harness the best of science and technology to address many of the issues limiting their development, make use of their vast resources of indigenous knowledge (confirmed by rigorous scientific methods), reaffirm national pride in their own heritage and achievements, and chart a new course for a more sustainable development pattern. International cooperation is to the mutual benefit for all.

In addition, the more S&T proficient among the developing nations (Brazil, Chile, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, for example) have the opportunity and responsibility not only to help themselves but to work with their brethren in other developing nations so that they too may build their S&T capacities.³

In effect, individual human development is now viewed as essential to each nation's - and the world's - longterm economic development. Technological advances - coupled with improved education and training

- lead to improvements in human capital, which in turn produce more and better goods and services. Along the way, this 'virtuous cycle' can promote free expression and public discourse, not necessarily out of altruism but as an economic imperative.

Yet, despite the remarkable results that scientific advances and technological innovations can potentially engender, these times are marred by conflict, violence, economic uncertainty, chronic deprivation and poverty, and far too many marginal, even threatened, lives. Although we know that science and technology can indeed help feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the environment, provide dignity in work, and create space for the joy of selfexpression, impoverished societies lack the wherewithal to apply them.

In fact, a vicious cycle is at work whereby the developing nations (especially the S&T-lagging countries) fall farther and farther behind the industrialized nations that do have the resources - in financial, as well as human-development terms - to apply scientific advances and new technologies ever more intensively and creatively. Numerous young professionals from developing nations often emigrate, or remain in the industrialized nations where they may have received some education and training, instead of applying their skills at home - where the need may often be the greatest but prospects for present-day opportunities the worst. This 'brain drain' actively depletes some of the developing nations' human resources, and it is being exacerbated as the populations of wealthy countries get older, more people retire, and attractive employment opportunities arise there.

Wide as it is, therefore, the current gap is likely to grow even wider - perhaps becoming an unbridgeable chasm - as the industrialized nations continue to master the tools of science and invention, vastly outspend the developing nations in research and development, and even divert some of the developing nations' most precious human resources for their own use. [See Boxes 3 and 4 for descriptions of the current disparities in population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per-capita across nations, as well as population projections for 2015.]

The high-income nations devote a significantly greater share of their national resources to science and technology, as reflected in expenditures for research and development. (See Box 5 for comparative data on national research spending as a percent of GDP.) While the high-income nations average 3,281 scientists and engineers per million population, the middle-income nations average 788. (See Box 6.) While patents granted to residents of high-income nations average about 346 per million population, the middle-income nations average 10. (See Box 7.) Moreover, the quality of developing-nation scientists' local training, not to mention the material resources at their disposal, is not on a par with what their industrialized-nation colleagues typically enjoy.

Such comparisons do not bode well for the ability of developing nations to participate in the new age of science and technology, so as to be more than mere consumers of the technological exports of the industrialized nations. The cultivation and deployment of human capital - building and maintaining the infrastructures that assure a nation's education, skills, and connectedness with the rest of the world - will be key to the ability of developing nations not only to improve their situation but to contribute to the welfare of everyone else. Surely the 80 percent of humanity living in those countries should have a greater input into the creation of new knowledge, not only for the right to shape their own destinies, but for the insight and talent that they can bring to the rest of the world.

The figures are troubling. Social and economic indicators in developing nations have not improved in the last decade, and many are getting worse. Today, the number of telephone lines per 1,000 persons stands at 592 in the high-income nations and at 152 and 30 in the middle-income and low-income nations, respectively. (See Box 8.) The number of personal computers per 1,000 persons is 430 for the high-income nations, 35 for those of middle income, and 6 for the low income. The high-income nations account for 15 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of its Internet connections. (See Box 9.)⁴

The future does not look any more promising. The industrialized nations are pulling farther in front of many of the developing nations in the preparation of the next generation of talent. In the late 1990s, tertiary-school enrollments in the low-, middle-, and high-income countries stood at 5, 15, and 58 percent, respectively, of the eligible populations.⁵ And such quantitative indicators do not take into account the enormous differentials in quality of education, especially at the primary and secondary levels, between countries at either end of the spectrum.

Furthermore, societies continue to discriminate against women, who constitute half of the world's population but in many countries receive only one-tenth of the income and own less than one percent of the property. Women constitute about three-fifths of the world's illiterate, and in many regions receive less food, education, and health care than do men. In addition, certain cultural practices adversely affect the well-being of girls and women. Bad as it is, the situation is worsening in some ways - over the past 20 years, the number of rural women living in poverty has almost doubled.

With regard to cultivating S&T resources in particular, girls are discouraged from pursuing careers in science and technology, and the world thereby loses the potentially enormous contributions of most of its women. Even those few who overcome these obstacles face difficult career choices that require special attention. Furthermore, many ethnic, religious, and other minorities also face discrimination and are unable to develop to their full potential or to make their best contributions to society. This too will

require explicit attention in the design of any national program that seeks to promote S&T capacity building.

On the whole, an unprecedented large number of young people - many of whom would be quite capable of acquiring scientific and technological competence if given the opportunity - are coming of age within the developing nations without adequate opportunities for intellectual development or economic participation. To prevent the economic disparity among nations from continuing to increase, with worrisome social and political consequences, the talents of many of these young men and women should be channeled into productive participation in the global scientific/technological/industrial enterprise.

But while wealthy nations have come to understand that the most precious resource of a country is its human capital, given the knowledge that people may generate and their ability to use it, this is often not the case in less-developed nations where the urgency to overcome social malaise in the here-and-now leads to insufficient emphasis on longer-term needs. It is against this backdrop that we must address the role of science and technology, acting in a concerted and decisive fashion to apply them to meet head-on the challenge of poverty in our interconnected world.