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China's Investment on Scientific R&D Reaches 1% of GDP Last Year
The country's expenditure on research and experimental development (R&D) reached 89.6 billion yuan last year, up 17.9 percent on 1999, or accounting for 1 percent of GDP, heralding that of developing countries declared the seven ministries including the Ministry of Science and Technology on Thursday.
The ratio of R&D to GDP is an important international benchmark that measures a nation's scientific development scale and partly reflects the potential of economic growth, said Vice-Minister of Science and Technology Deng Nan at a press conference Thursday in Beijing.
"It has the direct impact to the nation's development strategy to know the investment situation in the field of scientific research and experimental development and to define its status quo and the international status according to the international routines", Deng said.
Of the total expenditures, 4.67 billion yuan went for basic research, or 5.2 percent, 15.21 billion yuan for application research, or 17 percent and 69.72 billion yuan for experiment development, or 77.8 percent, said Zhu Xiangdong, deputy-director of the National Bureau of Statistics.
The survey found that R&D investment from enterprises topped 54.06 billion yuan, or 60.3 percent of the country's total, while major universities and academic institutions invested 7.66 billion and 25.82 billion yuan respectively.
But the country still lags far behind the developed nations in spite of the increasing expenditure, especially in the field of basic research. For example, the ratio of basic research to the total expenditure is 15 percent in the United States, 12.2 percent in Japan, 25 percent in the UK, France and Italy, 14.1 percent in South Korea and 16.1 percent in Russia, according to Deng.
According to the Ministry of Science and Technology, China is expected to raise the ratio of R&D to GDP to 1.5 percent or more by 2005 and in the following four years, the growth rate for the investment in research and experiment is expected to average around 18 percent.
By PD Online Staff Li Heng
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