News & Views item - September  2004

 

 

Australian Bureau of Statistics Releases Latest Figures for Research and Experimental Development for All Sectors. (September 13, 2004)

    Following on last week's release by the ABS of Business Expenditure on Research and Development (BERD) today it added data for contributions from the government and private non-profit sectors. Surprisingly, while that material released on the ABS web site regarding BERD provided an analysis not only in terms of current dollars it also allowed meaningful temporal comparisons by providing chain volume measure.  The chain volume measure is not included in today's release. As is obvious from the first chart (below left), it makes a difference.

 

Bradley Smith, Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies has provided the summarising tables  below, and makes the following observations:

The increase in non-business R&D is driven by university R&D spend and it is controversial how much of this figure is real, given the assumptions on how much time teaching and research academics now really do on research given the major deterioration on staff/student ratios, increased bureaucracy etc. Furthermore, if anything the increase is a testament to the increased productivity of academics - but it is entirely unreasonable to expect continued growth in higher education contribution to the national R&D effort without substantial increases in investment in our universities.

 

The increase in GERD is at the low/middle end of the changes in OECD countries spend ie not exactly clawing our way back toward the average (the changes are outlined in table B ­ the change column is FASTS' work ­ the other two are ABS data)

 

The data for 2003/4, 2004/5 is likely to fall again as Government spend has not maintained its share relative to GDP (ie dropped to 0.62% from 0.66% in 2004/5 budget).

The ABS R&D summery by sector is available at

 

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/lookupMF/07E66F957A46864BCA25695400028C64

 

and click here to view a write-up of the earlier ABS release on Business Expenditure on Research and Development.



 

 

Table A: GROSS EXPENDITURE ON R&D ($m)

(r = subject to possible slight revision)

 

1996-97

1998-99

2000-01

2002-03

Business

4,234.7

r4,094.7

r4,982.6

5,978.6

Govt – C’wealth

1,266.6

r1,179.4

r1,404.8

1,531.3

Govt – State/Terr

797.7

r863.6

r951.0

950.9

Higher Ed

2,307.6

2,555.1

r2,789.8

3,429.6

Private non-profit

185.8

r225.3

r289.0

359.5

Total

8,792.4

r8,918.1

r10,417.1

12,249.9

 

Table B: GERD/GDP RATIOS OF OECD COUNTRIES

 

2000-01

2002-03

Change

Finland

3.40

3.46

0.06

Japan

2.99

3.12

0.13

Iceland

2.75

3.09

0.34

Korea

2.65

2.91

0.26

United States of America

2.72

2.67

(0.05)

Germany

2.49

2.52

0.03

Denmark

na

2.52

Na

France

2.18

2.20

0.02

Austria

1.86

1.93

0.07

Canada

1.92

1.91

(0.01)

United Kingdom

1.84

1.88

0.04

Norway

na

1.67

Na

Australia

1.55

1.62

0.07

Czech Republic

1.33

1.30

(0.03)

Spain

0.94

1.03

0.09

Hungary

0.80

1.02

0.22

Portugal

0.80

0.93

0.13

Poland

0.66

0.59

(0.07)

Slovak Republic

0.65

0.58

(0.07)

NB: This table lists OECD countries with comparable data - not all OECD countries are listed.
Source for both tables is ABS 8112.0 Research and Experimental Development, All Sector Summary, Australia (13/9/04)