Number

A detailed 589-page study released last week by the US National Science Foundation (NSF Science & Engineering Indicators 2012; www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/ ) points to two telling global trends in the funding of modern research and development (R&D): . Firstly, the strong leadership of the United States remains undeniable, whose total expenditures (government and business) on R&D amounted to more than $400 billion in 2009, which is more than twice the investment in R&D in China, the second country in the world by this indicator. On average, since 2004, total US investment in R&D has grown by 5.8% per year, much faster than the average growth of the economy as a whole over these years (3.3%).

Despite this strong US leadership, the second clear global trend is the literally explosive growth of R&D funding in Asia - by an average of as much as 20% per year. In particular, such growth in China and South Korea provided the Asian region with 29% of all global investments in R&D, despite the fact that the US share is now 31%, and the EU - 23%. Even more important is that the share of Asian countries continues to grow steadily, while the share of the US and EU continues to gradually decrease. In general, R&D funding turns out to be concentrated in such a way that only a few leading countries are responsible for 80% of all R&D investments in the world, and the top ten looks like this:

At the same time, the global leaders in the share of investments in R&D in their GDP are completely different, “small” countries - Israel (4.28%), Finland (3.96%), Sweden (3.62%), Denmark (3 .02%), Switzerland (3.0%), Taiwan (2.93%).

A.K.