A large proportion of the so-called public R&D spending is actually backdoor subsidies to company's normal production activities.<p>Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1].<p>Traditionally 'Research' was deemed to be up to TRL-3, and 'Development' up to TRL-5. The distinctions are important as there are far stricter subsidy percentage limits on public funding of 'Development' then on 'Research'.<p>Now industry lobbying is trying (successfully) to have everything up to TRL-7 be labeled under 'R&D'. Sad times for the real research in the EU, as overall budgets aren't increased and the higher the TRL, the higher the investments that can now make a claim on the money.<p>A single car factory production line development subsidy can eat up a region's whole yearly R&D budget if left unchecked. It's not private enterprises aren't already swimming in public money, but this is a further land-grab on public funds.<p>An example: at the same time VW got fines for diesel-gate in other parts of the world, Belgium (which holds the dubious honor of being both a 'tax heaven' for companies with rates in practice close to 0%, while at the same time being the world record holder for taxing workers pay of around 54%) was cutting VW new deals and funneling VW millions of € in subsidies).<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level</a>
Given the expansive definition of R&D esp. given the tax rebates companies get in their respective countries even a website using a new framework can be categorized as Research and Development. So that begs the question how do we qualify real "R&D" from fake R&D ?<p>what are the markers a curious investigator should look for in this pile of data ?
India's is a sad state. It is partly to do with the fact that the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations. K Vijayaraghavan, the DBT secretary, and a NAS fellow, has written a piece on the matter.<p><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-intellectual-colonialism-to-excel-in-science-and-technology/story-wfbhX71Evf9ilqqUKkjAQL.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-inte...</a>
Implicit in this is the idea that if country X invests a significantly larger amount in research than country Y, then X will have significantly more output than Y. I don't buy this. And the reason I don't is because my own country, a small one, gets so much of its input from the US, that a doubling of research spending probably wouldn't do much of a corresponding difference (not produce many more Feynmans, I'm afraid). Culture within the country (e.g. attitude towards disruptors) and how the institutions are set up matters a huge amount.
Where is Taiwan?!<p>Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita:
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation-race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...</a>
I was excited to see such a fresh UI from the UNESCO site when the page first loaded, then as I started reading I realized the right half of every sentence is cut off in Safari on iPhone 6/7/8.
So by absolute spending, there are basically 3 centers:<p>1. USA
2. East Asia
3. West Europe<p>East Asia combined, their spending is bigger than USA and EU.<p>What will be more interesting is to break down those spending on what particular field they are spent on, but I guess that data is hard to collect.<p>Overall, in line with my every day feeling, but kinda unimpressed as well. South Korea is an outlier here, their spending in R&D is absolutely massive in both relative/absolute terms.
I am from a country in the bottom left 1/16th of the graph and can confirm. The whole economy is about subcontracting and sucking in money from various EU grants, any offices of global businesses are sad outsourcing and offshoring centers.
If you click on the country it shows you the "R&D spending by sector of performance" where sectors are Business, Government, University. For all big spenders (right part of the chart) the business share is the biggest.
Wouldn’t it have been a more helpful/useful comparison to show R&D as a % of GDP alongside % of PPP-adjusted GDP? Total R&D spend in PPP$ seems like a not-so-useful comparison since it's still biased by size of an economy, whereas % of total GDP is trying to normalize for that (albeit not perfectly).
I really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century, and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be incorporated the world over.<p>India on the other hand ... It's interesting how the homeland of the Semitic and Dharmic religions have fared (both historically and contemporarily).