Abstract
China will overtake Japan to become the world's second biggest spender
on research and development by the end of 2006, according to a forecast
released at the beginning of the month. But the estimates by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conflict
with official Chinese figures, and a senior Chinese science policy
advisor warns the report might have overestimated China's spending.
The OECD says China will have spent over US$136 billion on research
and development (R&D) in 2006, more than Japan's predicted US$130
billion. If correct, this makes China the world's second biggest
spender on R&D behind the United States, estimated to invest US$330
billion this year. But the OECD figure is quite different to the
official Chinese figures. According to China's National Bureau of
Statistics, the country's R&D spending in 2005 was about US$30 billion.
With a 20 per cent projected growth for this year, it should reach
$36 billion by the end of 2006, just over a quarter of the amount
predicted by the OECD report.
The OECD report is based on China's R&D investment from 2000-2004,
with an average projected annual growth of 20 per cent. Dirk Pilat,
head of the organisation's science, technology and industry division,
told SciDev.Net that the figure in the OECD report is based on the
real purchasing power of the Chinese yuan within China, which is
nearly four times the current exchange rate. This allows the Chinese
government to get more for its money than the equivalent amount of
dollars would buy in the United States.
But Zeng Guoping, a senior science policy advisor at the Beijing-based
Tsinghua University, warned that basing calculations on real purchasing
power could overvalue the currency, as much research equipment is
purchased internationally. Speaking to SciDev.Net he said that China
has enjoyed perhaps the fastest growth in R&D spending in the world.
But if China wants to remain competitive, he said, it will have to
increase its spending on basic science research ? for instance in
physics, chemistry, genome sequencing and mathematics ? from its
current 5 per cent of the total R&D budget.
The OECD report also showed that the number of science researchers
in China has grown by 77 per cent between 1995 and 2004, reaching
926,000. This is not far behind the 1.3 million researchers in the
United States.
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