September 01, 2020
China again boosts R&D spending by more than 10%
China continued its yearslong run of double-digit percentage
increases in spending on R&D in 2019, but the nation is likely to
fall short of a long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to
2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by this year. But not hitting the
target "should not be considered a failure, as China has been increasing
its R&D expenditure over the past several decades at a rate higher
than GDP growth,†says Cao Cong, a science policy specialist at the
University of Nottingham’s Ningbo, China, campus.To get more China news, you can visit shine news official website.
Total public and private science and technology expenditures in 2019
rose 12.5% over the previous year to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($322
billion), the National Bureau of Statistics reported yesterday. Spending
on basic research accounted for 6% of the total; applied research,
11.3%; and development, 82.7%. The spending amounted to 2.23% of GDP, an
increase of 0.09 percentage points from the previous year.
The 2.5% of GDP by 2020 goal was spelled out in China’s most recent Five
Year Plan and in a 15-year Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science
and Technology Development. For comparison, the United States spent
2.83% of GDP on R&D in 2018, according to the 5 August Main Science
and Technology Indicators of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation
and Development (OECD), which covers 37 of the world’s largest national
economies. OECD as a whole spent 2.38% of GDP on R&D in 2018. Israel
and South Korea spent 4.9% and 4.5% of GDP, respectively, in 2018.In
terms of absolute expenditures, China is the world’s second biggest
spender on R&D, with $468 billion versus the United States’s
investment of $582 billion in 2018 according to OECD’s purchasing power
parity comparison.
But Cao and other analysts expect
China to continue to close the gap. Cao points to several research
milestones China passed in 2019. Investment in basic research reached 6%
of total spending for the first time after hovering at just over 5% for
10 years. And combined national and local governmental expenditures on
research topped 1 trillion yuan for the first time. He expects new,
ambitious targets to be set in the next 5-year and medium-to-long-term
science plans, which are now under discussion.
Research
priorities are yet to be set for the new plans, says Xie Xuemei, a
specialist in innovation economics at Shanghai University. She says it
is not clear to what extent the COVID-19 crisis will influence the
plans. But she thinks there will be more emphasis on bolstering medical
systems, public health emergency response capabilities, and life
sciences in general.
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