Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies Comments on Latest BERD Figures. (August 23, 2007)

    Business Investment In R&D continues to grow.

The Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) has welcomed the latest set of figures released  by the Australian Bureau of Statistics which show Australian business expenditure on R&D (BERD) grew for the 7^th year in a row to a record $10.08 billion in 2005-06.

The President of FASTS, Professor Tom Spurling said the sustained improvement in BERD is a welcome and positive sign that Australian firms are building their capacity to compete in the global knowledge economy: BERD rose to 1.04% of GDP in 2005/6, the first time it has ever passed 1%.

Professor Spurling said: "Business investment in R&D was a very modest 0.64% in 2001 so this result continues the strong improvement in the past 5 years. Nevertheless Australia still trails the OECD average of 1.53% but the gap has closed from 0.75% in 2001-02 to 0.47% in 2005­06."

He also pointed out that some countries, including the UK and Canada have experienced falls in business expenditure on R&D by 0.1% ­ 0.2% of GDP in the
same period, and noted:  "One trend that is becoming quite marked is the very different levels of investment between the States and Territories. Victoria invests 1.27% of Gross State Product and Western Australia allocate 1.25%, significant increases over the past several years, where as NSW and South Australia are steady at 1.04%, well ahead of Queensland (0.70%), NT (0.64%), ACT (0.51%) and
Tasmania (0.42%)."

Professor Spurling also pointed to: "The marked differences are partly explained by industry profiles ­ e.g. the high share of mining in Western Australia ­ but it does raise the question as to
what are the long-term consequences of uneven development.