Gross Expenditures on R&D Are Rising Fast in China

Other countries are keeping up, but the U.S. isn’t one of them.

I recently wrote a piece for Cosmos Magazine about China’s rapid ascent to scientific relevance in recent decades. In short, China is on track to become the global leader in contributions to top scientific journals by 2025. This is one of several metrics that indicates change is afoot on the global science scene, which has been dominated by the United States since World War II.

Another metric worth noting is gross expenditures in research and development. The GERD, as it is known, measures how much money companies, research institutes, universities and government laboratories spend on research and development in a given country. For the sake of comparisons, this statistic is best represented as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

An international policy consortium called The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has done a nice job compiling GERD data since 2000. Their data shows that so far this century, the U.S. has only slightly increased their budget allocation for research and development, which hangs somewhere below 3% of their GDP. Despite the premier status of the U.S. in terms of scientific output, there are at least five smaller countries that now spend a larger proportion of their GDP on R&D, many of which have ramped up investments in science and tech recently.

Since 2000, Australia and Taiwan have surpassed the U.S. going from 2% to just over 3%. Japan has been steadily growing above 3%, while Israel has similarly hovered above 4%. South Korea, meanwhile, has skyrocketed past everyone else to join Israel above 4%. I’ve graphed the corresponding data below:

Although China’s GERD is only just above 2%, they are still worth noting here for two reasons. First, like other Asian countries and Australia, their GERD has been sharply on the rise since 2000. And second, unlike these other countries, China is home to 1.4 billion people and a huge, growing economy. Their stock market as well as their contributions to science are second only to the U.S.

What all of this means is that, if these trends continue, the U.S. will concede their top-dog status in the world of science and tech to China during the next decade; and this will happen because unlike Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the U.S. has failed to keep pace with China’s increasing GERD.

Read more about China rise to scientific greatness in my story with Cosmos here.