
How much countries spend in R&D - yoquan
http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/
======
PeterStuer
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level)

~~~
flipp3r
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.

~~~
avar
I work for a company mainly based in The Netherlands that gets a ~$400 million
USD/yr tax cut through WBSO. Search for "Innoation Box" here:
[http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html](http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html)

It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract
from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm
wrong).

It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get more
knowledge workers into the country and to stimulate that sort of economic
activity in general.

~~~
radicalbyte
Those knowledge workers can also get a flat 30% tax reduction which is applied
to their gross wage before other reductions. The end result is that someone
earning 100k EUR a year has a net take home pay of 101k EUR.

Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I
could have, only I found out about it too late).

~~~
avar
Indeed, but this is unrelated to whether or not their employer participates in
"research" via WBSO or any other schema, it's more like the U.S. H1B program,
i.e. they've got to try to search for talent domestically (or at least make a
show of it), not find it, and then pay above a certain amount for the job.

------
sremani
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 ?

~~~
tragomaskhalos
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.

~~~
tomxor
Yes I had exactly the same experience! it seems like the people reviewing what
qualifies have absolutely no technical understanding.

Even when trying to be honest, the questions are posed so vaguely that they
are really relying on you taking the moral high ground when choosing what
_you_ think qualifies as R&D, even then it becomes an internal battle of
definitions.

~~~
PeterStuer
As one of those reviewers I beg to differ on the non-understanding part :).

You have to understand that the reviews happen in context. What isn't always
understood by the layman is that countries/regions etc. aren't reluctant to
grant subsidies, but actually want to subsidize as much as they can get away
with.

The break on the system is international treaties of mutually agreed limits on
what you are allowed to subsidize. But the agreed budget will be spent.

The distribution strategy and selectivity are often set by the political
factions that hold the office at the time, and the administration is bound by
the strategy laid out.

This can vary from being realy critical and looking for true R&D high
potential high-risk/high potential risk taking, to lowering the bar and just
give everyone a little bit of the budget with few questions asked.

Reviewers are always allowed to be very honest in their assessments, and have
more than enough experience in seeing through all the shady hand-waving. They
also usually look into the potential of the company/team beyond the strict
letter of funding proposal dossier as submitted. How the expert advise is
taken into account in a funding decision is up to the administration. The
reviewer is paid for the review, and is not even informed of the final
decisions.

~~~
tomxor
It sounds like we are talking about different things: this was in the form of
R&D tax rebates, and all due respect, the reviewers involved asked for more
and more "plain english" descriptions of the technology to the point of
meaningless.

~~~
PeterStuer
Ah! My review experience is in direct innovation project grants. I have been
on the defending (receiving) side of the R&D tax rebates. As far as I could
tell, these types of negotiations are done by people from the finance and
economy, not the innovation and R&D administration. This is also the domain of
professional intermediaries from the Big-5 offering this as a service. If you
were there as the token 'techie' (I know i was), your unspoken role would
typically have been to spew jargon and tech details, of which neither your
financial consultants nor the administration representative would understand
one word. They weren't looking for technical insights, just judging in how-far
the activities and people you are claiming the rebates for differ from your
'normal' activities and employee pool, so they can draw a line somewhere.

------
throwaway_tvs
India's is a sad state. It is partly to do with the fact that the nation
maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere
'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the
US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations. K Vijayaraghavan, the DBT secretary, and a NAS
fellow, has written a piece on the matter.

[https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-
inte...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-intellectual-
colonialism-to-excel-in-science-and-technology/story-
wfbhX71Evf9ilqqUKkjAQL.html)

~~~
voltooid
Respectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and
maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues
with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in
improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs
anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low-
paid job. It seems to have not a lot to do with language. There are more
factors here.

Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and
English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the
reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education
system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing
the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in
education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between
the two systems?

~~~
carlmr
>How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly
absent in the Indian system?

No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem
solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical
thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be
a little bit of a rebel.

~~~
qubax
> No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem
> solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures.

Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step
and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go
to a silly route ).

You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And
we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization.
Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.

I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to
memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be
poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.

As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.

~~~
carlmr
I see what you mean, you have to memorize the very basics. What I meant by
route memorization learning culture is a bit different though.

I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me
some of the problems his students could solve.

I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't
solve some of them myself.

On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book.
It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about
100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.

I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of
problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.

The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should
understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an
algorithm.

For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have
computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class
was trying to educate humans to be computers.

------
antome
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.

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

~~~
friendstock
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-
innovatio...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation-
race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html)

------
tw1010
Implicit in this is the idea that if country X invests a significantly larger
amount in research than country Y, then X will have significantly more output
than Y. I don't buy this. And the reason I don't is because my own country, a
small one, gets so much of its input from the US, that a doubling of research
spending probably wouldn't do much of a corresponding difference (not produce
many more Feynmans, I'm afraid). Culture within the country (e.g. attitude
towards disruptors) and how the institutions are set up matters a huge amount.

------
friendstock
Where is Taiwan?!

Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-
innovatio...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation-
race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html)

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

~~~
virtuabhi
Taiwan is not a part of UN?

~~~
arteez
very simplified TLDR - Taiwan was in the UN as the representative of China and
blocked People's Republic of China until 1970s when second and third world
countries voted PRC in instead of Taiwan and now PRC as the representative of
China blocks Taiwan
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations)

fun fact, because USSR was boycotting the UN over this issue in the 50s there
was no one left to veto US's intervention in Korea, therefore it was okay by
UNSC

------
siruncledrew
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.

~~~
131012
May I suggest you get access to a monitor?

In all seriousness, data visualization requires all the space it can get. I
agree the graphics are not that fancy, but displaying them on mobile would be
rather uninteresting as everything would be tiny.

Hence the minimal effort put on responsiveness.

~~~
nojvek
Usability. They tried to do all sorts of fancy charts when a simple one could
have sufficed. I’d bet HN has more mobile viewers and desktop.

So in this case all that expensive money spent making that page isn’t really
worth it since a large part of internet wouldn’t even be able to properly read
it.

Worse is they half arsed responsiveness. Could have left safari to browse the
page like a normal desktop page but their width metadata gives a very poor
experience.

------
tanilama
So by absolute spending, there are basically 3 centers:

1\. USA 2\. East Asia 3\. West Europe

East Asia combined, their spending is bigger than USA and EU.

What will be more interesting is to break down those spending on what
particular field they are spent on, but I guess that data is hard to collect.

Overall, in line with my every day feeling, but kinda unimpressed as well.
South Korea is an outlier here, their spending in R&D is absolutely massive in
both relative/absolute terms.

------
drpgq
Ugh, I can only imagine the amount Canada wastes on dubious SHRED grants.

------
early
% 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

~~~
PeterStuer
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.

~~~
baddox
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.

~~~
philipps
Which is why a more exaggerated comparison would be this: a person who walks
home after finishing work to cook dinner with the family using vegetables
grown in the backyard vs a person who eats out in a bar, drives home drunk,
gets into an accident, ends up in hospital, and creates a huge increase in
GDP.

The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk
driver creates jobs for car manufacturers, police officers, and doctors) but
it shows how our narrow focus on GDP rewards behavior that may not be
desirable.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _and creates a huge increase in GDP_

That evening, sure. In the long run, their productivity is likely diminished.
You see a similar binge-and-reckoning cycle in macroéconomies, the difference
being practically nobody is rewarded for higher GDP. Governments are rewarded
for having larger tax bases.

~~~
PeterStuer
I hope you'll forgive me for the bluntness, but I'm trying to be brief.

First a question: how come 'productivity' has gone up by 2% annually for
nearly a century (if you know compounding you know how massive this is), yet
we all have to 'work hared' and 'longer' for less, while our social security
is being eroded?

'productivity' in a 'Red Queen's Race'[1] economy has 0 value. We're not doing
work to ensure 'survival' or 'progress' anymore. 10% of People could carry
that. We long ago stopped having a production problem, we have a(n
artificially sustained) distribution problem.

At the 'economic ground floor' level we're in a self accelerating 'service
economy' which at the systems level is both driven and preyed upon by a 'rent-
seeking' economy that in socio-economic power far outplays the former.
Transactions are the key, not what actually goes around.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)

~~~
dredmorbius
You could see real productivity increase by some measure (entropic, say, or
total available free energy), with the "work harder and longer" dynamic, by
other mechanisms.

Failure to equitably distribute gains, a capricious allocation such that
individuals might make mint one year, be skint the next. No viable pensions or
annuity system. Etc.

Value extraction from labour is _the_ age-old economics problem. It faced
feudal peasants, it faces the modern urban/suburban knowledge wage slave
paying it all out in rent or mortgage interest. David Ricardo's two bugbears
were the laws of rent and wages, in opposition to one another.

GDP's distortions are legion, but you still have the rent/wage dilemma without
that.

... Though some measures of gross happiness or support might address that.
Hrm. We mearsure GDP. But Smith says:

 _POLITICAL œconomy, considered as a branch of the science of aThe first
object of political economy is to provide subsistence for the people statesman
or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful
revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to
provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply
the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.
It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign._

[http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-
the-...](http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-nature-
and-causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-cannan-ed-vol-1)

That is, his standard for economic performance is support of the population,
generally, and financing the state. Elsewhere and earlier he calls explicitly
for improving the lot of the poorest especially.

GDP does none of this.

I've beeen meaning to read Kuznts's notes specifically for some time.

------
expertentipp
I am from a country in the bottom left 1/16th of the graph and can confirm.
The whole economy is about subcontracting and sucking in money from various EU
grants, any offices of global businesses are sad outsourcing and offshoring
centers.

------
mceoin
Anyone know how much Taiwan spends on R&D? My dated recollection was quite
high (10%?)

------
perfunctory
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.

------
aportela
Wouldn’t it have been a more helpful/useful comparison to show R&D as a % of
GDP alongside % of PPP-adjusted GDP? Total R&D spend in PPP$ seems like a not-
so-useful comparison since it's still biased by size of an economy, whereas %
of total GDP is trying to normalize for that (albeit not perfectly).

------
bnolsen
This website sucks beyond amazing belief. I couldn't take it and left.

~~~
ainiriand
So long for constructive comments...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

'Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something.'

------
gnulinux
Website is cancer on mobile. Using Materialistic HN APP on Android.

------
cryptozeus
Great interactive site

------
uvu
My country is not even on the list.

------
corv
Obviously R&D spending is not high enough to make this website scale correctly
on mobile...

------
throwaway_tvs
I really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts
using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century,
and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion
of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf
prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be
incorporated the world over.

India on the other hand ... It's interesting how the homeland of the Semitic
and Dharmic religions have fared (both historically and contemporarily).

~~~
iagovar
But why does this happen in Israel? They don't benefit from the huge capital
flows and single market of the US

~~~
dewey
I could be wrong but from what I read a while ago it's that there's not much
traditional resources to export (Farming, Mining,..) and instead there's a
focus on R&D and exporting technology. There's probably also a very high
amount of R&D in the military sector that's subsidies as they have a very high
export rate there (Elbit, Rafael,...).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _there 's a focus on R&D and exporting technology_

Mandatory military service produces a disciplined and well-networked
population. Israel also benefits from sensible commercial law and relatively
efficient courts, two things India grossly lacks.

