Live data from Hacker News

How much countries spend in R&D

uis.unesco.org

1–10 of 88 posts

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#6
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 ?

what are the markers a curious investigator should look for in this pile of data ?

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#7
post #3

% of GDP can be a bit misleading as rich countries easy fall to the left of the graph. I would rather see $ spent per person

The graph seems to indicate that rich countries are spending a lot on R&D as a % of GDP. $ per person would be great though.

Edit: What's interesting to me is just how dominant business R&D spending is for the larger economies. The top spenders in nominal terms are all large diverse economies. The main industry that came to mind for me is the auto industry. The top countries all have massive auto industries.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#9
A large proportion of the so-called public R&D spending is actually backdoor subsidies to company's normal production activities.

Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1].

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'.

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.

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.

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).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

Post reply on HN