R&D investment: Fast-growing economies rapidly gaining on U.S.
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/18/2008 12:57:00 PM
The National Association Manufacturers (NAM) is calling on U.S. government policymakers to lend support to manufacturing research and development by, among other things, renewing the R&D tax credit that expired at the end of 2007.
This admonition was delivered in the latest of a series of NAM-published reports, called The Facts About Modern Manufacturing. The R&D report was the ninth in the series.
In the report NAM states, “For more than half a century, the United States has led the world in science and innovation. In today’s competitive world, the United States can no longer take its supremacy for granted. Aggregate R&D spending by six fast-growing economies (China, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) is on track to exceed U.S. spending in a few years.”
The report then went to say that as of 2004, the U.S. remained the world’s leading R&D investor followed by Japan and other developed, OECD countries. But the tide definitely is turning with emerging countries such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan having increased their gross R&D investments by about 178 percent since 1995, while U.S. has increased its investment by 38 percent over that time. China alone has tripled R&D funding during that same period, the NAM report states.
“This is a call to action for policymakers to renew and strengthen the R&D tax credit that expired at the end of 2007 and provide more funding for federally supported R&D,” the report concludes.
For more of NAM’s facts about modern manufacturing, go to: www.nam.org/facts.
