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R&D investment in South Korea and China

South Korea ranks first in the world for research and development (R&D) investment as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), but spends just 28.5% of what China does in total investment, a recent study shows.

South Korea’s cumulative R&D investment over the past 32 years was also found to be roughly one-fifteenth of the US’s investment and one-seventh of Japan’s.

A report titled “Major South Korean Science and Technology Indicators at a Glance” published on Mar. 30 by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning noted that South Korea led the world in the rate of R&D investment as a percentage of GDP at 4.29% in 2014 and placed sixth in the world in total investment at US$60.5 billion.

But South Korea’s cumulative R&D investment over the 32 years between 1981 and 2013 amounted to 15.4 times less than the US‘s and 7.4 times less than Japan’s. The difference stems from the fact that those two countries have been investing 2% or more of GDP in R&D since the 1970s, while South Korea only began investing 2% of GDP in R&D in 1994.

China surpassed South Korea in total R&D investment in the late 1990s thanks to a large increase in its R&D spending. It has since widened the gap, with investment totaling US$211.8 billion in 2014.

The percentage invested in basic research has risen from 23.1% in 2006 to 39.0% this year. Basic research spending first passed applied research spending in 2008, while the amount of pure basic research spending out of all basic research spending has grown by an average of 14.8% annually since 2011.

But the ministry also advised further expansions in investment toward basic research, noting that while Japan began its push to focus investment on science and technology with the 1917 founding of the national science research institute RIKEN, South Korea did not establish its Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) until 1966.

South Korea experienced a significant rise in the number of Science Citation Index (SCI) papers, moving from 44th in the world in 1981 to 12th in 2014. But it ranked only 31rd in terms of citations relative to total papers published.

Choi Jong-bae, head of the ministry’s Science and Technology Strategy Office, announced plans to “discontinue the past quantity-centered evaluation system for published papers as a rule in favor of qualitative evaluation.”

South Korea did rank in the world’s top thirteen for number of SCI papers ranking in the top one percent for citations due to a more than threefold rise from 150 to 458 between 2004 and 2014.

Patent applications and registrations also increased sharply, with rises of 41.5 times in applications and 79.5 times in registrations in the 34 years from 1980 to 2014. South Korea ranked fourth in the world in 2014 for “triad patent” registrations, an indicator of patent quality that reflects registrations with the local patent offices in US, Japan, and Europe. It also placed fifth worldwide for standard patent ownership.

By Lee Keun-young, senior staff writer

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