FASTS Collates Public Funding for R&D 2000 through 2007. (August 29, 2008)

TFW received the memorandum below from Bradley Smith, Executive Director of the Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) which we quote in its entirety, and we are pleased to acknowledge the Australian Bureau of Statistics as the source and FASTS for all those tedious hours of compiling and converting the ABS data.

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Last year FASTS released a somewhat provocative discussion paper on structural change in Australian R&D called Is this what you had in mind?�

That paper showed that between 1996/7 and 2004/5, gross expenditure on R&D in Australia increased in real terms by 42%. However, the increase in expenditure in science (13.5%) was lower than health and medical research (82%) and humanities, arts and social sciences (50%). Moreover, science was the only broad field of R&D in Australia where gross expenditure declined as a percentage of GDP.

In the past couple of months the Australian Bureau of Statistics have updated their biennial series of data for Government, higher education and private not-for-profit expenditure on R&D. The next installment of industry R&D and gross national expenditure on R&D is due in October. When that is available I will provide some detailed analysis.

In the interim, I have updated data on Government and Higher Education R&D (see attached Excel file) expenditure from 2000/1 - 2006/7 ie the life of Backing Australia's Ability.

The 2 digit (code) data are publicly available but the 4 digit data were bought by FASTS from the ABS. I have not provided pre-2000 data as those collections used different codes which are not easily converted into the new categorisation.

In summary, the data show:

• Public R&D (the aggregate of Government and higher education R&D) increased by 32% in real terms (ie taking account of CPI/inflation) between 2000/1 and 2006/7. In that period expenditure on R&D in science increased by 17%; ICT 11%; Engineering 27%; health and medical 73%; and arts, humanities & social sciences 42%.

• Total Govt expenditure on R&D increased by a modest 2% with a 10% increase in Commonwealth and 9% decline in the aggregate of State and Territory Government expenditure.

• Higher Education expenditure on R&D increased by 56% in real terms in this period with science up 46%, engineering 54%, ICT 68%, health and medical research 73%; arts, humanities and social sciences 51%.

• In terms of 'market share', science declined from 46% to 41% of public R&D and from 33% to 31% in higher education. Indeed the 'market share' of science, ICT and engineering in public R&D all declined while arts, humanities and social sciences and medical research increased.

• While 'public' science increased by 17% in real terms between 2000/1 and 2006/7 there were significant differences between 2 digit fields of research with mathematics up 56%, physical sciences up 47%, but earth sciences down 8%, biological sciences up 24% and agriculture, veterinary and environmental sciences up 5%. However, within the 2 digit fields there were also significant variances. In agriculture, veterinary and environmental sciences, soil and water were up 49%, crop and pasture down 8%; horticulture down 21%, forestry down 36% but environmental sciences up 63%.

Notes on the data:

• Please note the data record which sector performed the R&D, not who funded it. That means Government R&D includes CSIRO, ANSTO, Geoscience Australia, AIMS for Commonwealth R&D and State Govt data include DPIs and some hospital research. However, ARC and NHMRC funded research is mostly performed by the university sector with small amounts in industry and private not-for-profit (ie medical research institutes) sectors. Similarly, industry funded R&D in universities is counted in higher education (HERD) data not industry.

• Public R&D is a category I use for such publications it is not one that ABS uses, thus if you use any of these data you will need to specify what 'Public R&D' is. Similarly, the aggregation of data into the 5 broad categories of science, ICT, Engineering, health and medical research and arts, humanities and socials sciences is my work and not a level of aggregation that ABS use.

• 4 digit data need to be used with caution as there can be some significant inconsistencies in use of codes by institutions and it only takes one larger university to mis-categorize and you have some rather strange patterns emerge.

• Chain volume measures -- I have converted the 'current year prices' into what the ABS call 'chain volume measures'. This essentially increases the $ of previous years to take account of inflation/CPI. In the attached Excel file all chain volume measures are expressed in $2006/7 values. This is also sometimes referred to as 'real terms' and it is meaningless to look at expenditure trends in anything but real terms.

• Please note that R&D expenditure includes labour, capital, non-labour current expenditure and provision for proportion of general services and administration attributable to R&D activities. The administrative on-costs can be quite a significant proportion of the expenditure.

 
When the industry R&D is available I will update the information again.

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Bradley Smith

Executive Director

Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies