How much countries spend in R&D • Hacker News Board

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#11

Post by tragomaskhalos » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:36 AM UTC

sremani wrote: post #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 ?

Absolutely - in the past I've been asked to review past work to see if it qualifies as R&D for tax purposes; this was all bespoke client stuff really, but the retrospective criterion was a vague handwave about reusability.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#12

Post by PeterStuer » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:41 AM UTC

early wrote: 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

Yes, GDP.

I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed.

Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outlandish and illustrates quite well how our economic ideology relentlessly pushes 'financialization' of service activities that used to be non-commercial. You need a job, and when you have one then you need to spend the money you earn on others to provide daycare and school lunches and house & garden maintenance ...

Financialization is key because it not just allows 'profits' to be made, but is essential to the 'rent seeking' economy as they can only exist by the nature of intermediating on transactions.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#13

Post by friendstock » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

Where is Taiwan?!

Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#14

Post by friendstock » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

toomanybeersies wrote: post #5

antome wrote: post #4

How much does Taiwan spend on R&D? I would guess that they are similar to South Korea and Japan, but they are nowhere on the charts.

I imagine they're not on the chart because they're not in the United Nations.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#15

Post by sbmthakur » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:59 AM UTC

siruncledrew wrote: post #2

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.

Offtopic but another bad thing I noticed was that the page was being served on HTTP.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#16

Post by baddox » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:02 AM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #12

early wrote: 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

Yes, GDP. I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed. Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outland…

Even your example doesn’t seem that pathological if you assume that the individuals are actually pursuing their preferences rather than deliberately trying to inflate their group GDP.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#17

Post by boomboomsubban » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

friendstock wrote: post #13

Where is Taiwan?! Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...

This comes out of UNESCO, a UN agency. So probably counted as part of China, but might just be ignored.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#18

Post by boomboomsubban » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:23 AM UTC

early wrote: 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

Then look at the data, where you can sort by total R&D per million residents or thousand in the labor force. Denmark, Iceland, Sweden are the top three.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#19

Post by flipp3r » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:25 AM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #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 stricte…

This. I can see the Netherlands on 2+% of GDP on the chart as well. The Netherlands indeed grants tax cuts if you do R&D (The law is called "WBSO"), however it totally depends on how you word what you're doing towards the tax authorities. Installing Kubernetes & building Jenkins pipelines? Sorry, that's obviously NOT R&D. Oh wait -- someone hired a company to word it slightly differently. Now you're getting an X million tax cut.

Source: Worked at a company that got a 10M+ tax cut for moving to Microservices & rewriting a fucking frontend in React.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#20

Post by perfunctory » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

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.