There is much more to a nation's "brain power" than how much it spends on R&D and education. The OECD tries to assess the broader picture by looking at "Investment in knowledge".
The OECD has just unleashed the latest edition of its OECD Fact Book, a veritable statistical avalanche. One number that you might not see elsewhere is spending on "investment in knowledge". This is, says the fact book, "a synthetic indicator designed to compare member countries' expenditures on their 'knowledge base' which are aimed at bringing future returns".
The definition of this indicator is the "sum of expenditure on R&D, on total higher education (public and private) and on software". The bean counters who divine the numbers are well aware that simply lumping these three together could double count, so the "data reported here have been adjusted to exclude the overlaps between components".
The country at the head of the league is Sweden, with 6.8 per cent of GDP invested in knowledge in 2002 or the "latest available year". The USA comes next, with 6.6 per cent. The OECD average is 5.1 per cent.
Other notable numbers are:
| Japan | 5% |
| EU | 3.8% |
| Korea | 5.9% |
| Germany | 3.9% |
| France | 3.7% |
| UK | 3.7% |
The narrative with the numbers observes that "For all the countries, except Ireland, the ratio of investment in knowledge-to-GDP was higher in 2002 than in 1994."
We also read that for most countries, "increases in software expenditure were the major source of increased investment in knowledge". Finland bucked this trend, where R&D was the main source of increase. So did Greece, where higher education and software were the main sources of increase.
The full chart looks like this:
The full chart looks like this:
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