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Given their economic capacity and tradition as the major providers of Overseas Development Aid, global development policy is an obvious field for much more advanced co-operation between Europe and Japan. However, while there are similar intentions and responsibilities, actual policies and preferences differ. Apart from different regional emphases, there are also different normative considerations that guide European and Japanese development assistance. Japan and Europe seem agree on a philosophy that emphasises humanitarian considerations, an appreciation of the concept of “human security”, the recognition of global interdependence, environmental conservation and potential for self-help as desirable conditions for development aid. When actual decisions on donations are made, many other considerations, among them traditional notions of regional hegemony and trade interest, seem to guide policy-makers in both regions. The paper looks at shared and differing concepts of Japanese and European development aid and asks whether better co-ordination between the poles could change the global debate on development aid. The paper has a normative agenda which is, however, rooted in a remarkably deep understanding of the practicalities of Japanese ODA. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biotechnology, as a unique technology, has become pervasive in the state-economy and world-society relations and is implicated as a knowledge-driven revolution that will change the direction or future of human life. Biotechnology’s potential for new discoveries to advance human progress through the powerful techniques of recombinant DNA is a powerful tool in the development strategies of nations. Its scientific, productive and financial aspects are sensitive to the dictates of global markets and have a transformative capacity in fostering (with integrated circuits) the next renewed expansion of the world economy. As a high and/or strategic technology (HST) it is capable of promoting growth. It is a phenomenon in possession of a dual novel characteristics ? its evolutionary capability and its unique power of replication or multiplication which, as a high intensity science and/or frontier technology (HISFT), confers on it salient agricultural and medical advantages. It is predicted that by the next twenty years a deluge of products running into trillions of dollars will be produced using rDNA technology. But the importance of science and technology in the international political economy is only meaningful or relevant within their socio-economic and political context. And in their social and political construct emerge as instruments of power and hegemony. The heuristic nature of biotechnology development is that of a structuralist dimension engendered by a world capitalist economy, of a trimodal arrangement of core, semiperiphery, and periphery countries within the international division of labor and production. This structuralist dimension and trimodal arrangement are of intrinsic causal relevance to the ontological analysis of biotechnology development, since as a highly commodified technology it introduces the concept of knowledge as property, and therefore the issues of innovation, transfer and the diffusion of techniques, products and produce become subject to national and international regimes of protection rights. And this commercialization of knowledge, in security and production structures, confers both structural and relational power, and too becomes an important determinant in the race to who becomes the next hegemon among the potential contenders, Japan, the United States, and German-led Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]