In my study, I hypothesize that the amount of research produced by a specific country is a function of the country's population size and GDP. This stems from the thought that the higher the number of people, the higher might be the number of researchers in the country and that the higher the GDP, the higher will be the amount of money directed for research. Although my results validate this hypothesis, I can't find publications supporting (or not) this theory and as such my discussion is still very poor. Any help is welcome and will be acknowledged.
There is a journal called 'Scientometrics' from Springer, you may find answer in some of the papers in that journal. I did the simple search of gdp research in this journal and the link to the results is as follow:
http://link.springer.com/search?query=gdp+research&search-within=Journal&facet-journal-id=11192
(1) You must clearly specify the definition of research. Is it the number of research papers produced? Is it restricted to particular discipline (e.g., science / social science / humanities etc.).
(2) Some variables reflecting educational status (e.g., literacy rate, number of universities per person etc.) may also help to explain cross-country variation.
Research has little to do with population growth, however, it is definitely positively related with economic growth. High income countries of West Europe, Japan, and the USA are some of the examples of this phenomenon. Economic growth encourages research, fostering technological development that in turn increases labor productivity, which eventually triggers further economic growth. Yes, economic growth and technological development complement each other.
According to our research results, there is a very week positive correlation between GDP and the research produced (published) but there is a very strong correlation between spending (budget) for research and development, spending on higher education and number of universities and the published research.
In a series of studies (that we published in various academic journals) we analyzed all Asian, European countries and Middle East as well and the results were similar.
You would need to make operational the concept of research. Do you mean publications or patents for example? Some research does indicate a positive relationship between GDP per capita and patents. But, this is hardly the most important relationship.
Yes, exceptions are always there, and that's true only for a small number of nations, not the whole world, in general.
Yes of course but they have to implement those research theories for it ...
There is some truth in all of the above answers. Some of the fastest growing countries in the world produce little in the way of research paper or patents. The wealth of the nation per capita surely is an important variable. Greater wealth per capita frees labor for non-manual activities. But there must be enough equity in income and wealth distribution to justify (on the demand side) the sales of products based on new patents. Really, it is much more complicated that this, and would take a book-length answer to complete the puzzle.
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