The United States of America have been ahead of all
international competition in terms of annual Research and
Development expenditure; this, for as long as we can
remember. The U.S bare an image of leading world statistics
on many various domains, but by taking a step back we can
speculate on one new R&D leading player in the next couple
of years.
According to OECD projections, based on most recent trends,
China's R&D investments would have exceeded Japan's in
2007, reaching 136 billion USD, opposed to Japan's 130
billion USD forecast. This puts China in the second R&D
investments position, still far behind U.S 's astronomical
330 billion. However, it is interesting to note that,
China's engineers and scientists usually make between
one-sixth and one-tenth of what Americans do, which means
that the wide gaps in economical terms do not necessarily
result in equally wide gaps in manpower or results.
"The rapid rise of China in both money spent and
researchers employed is stunning." Dirk Pilat, Head of the
OECD's Science and Technology Policy division.
When looking in depths at the manpower available, China
again meets the second place after the U.S. Nevertheless,
in China, the number of researchers increased by 77%
between 1995 and 2004, and China now benefits from the work
of 926,000 researchers, when the U.S employ 1.3 million.
Indorsing these figure, U.S production of engineers and
researchers is growing at a sluggish pace, when every year
China's universities and schools form 325,000 engineers in
average per year, which is five times as many as the U.S.
Not to mention China's R&D intensity (R&D/GDP ratio), which
has more than doubled from 0.6% of GDP in 1995 to just over
1.2% in 2004. This represents an increase from just over 17
billion USD in 1995 to 94 billion USD in 2004.
This has a very positive impact on both science and
high-technology sectors. China has launched a few very
competitive products, and has registered quality patents,
in a 10-year-old world emerging biotech industry. In a one
billion potential patients market, 15 Chinese biotech
products for health are already on the market, with another
60 still developing.
This points out the potential of China in advanced
technology, and it highlights the fact that China is not
only a country excelling in textile, toy factories and
other simple production facilities, but it is a major
player on skilled sectors such as R&D. One dreadfully
expensive challenge still lies ahead for China: developing
costly and state of the art research centers and scientific
infrastructure, generating a higher quality and more
numerous scientific investigations.
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Tim Lyons is Executive Director of Manage China. Manage
China is a company that helps foreign firms who are
interested in doing business in China.
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