Singapore's gross expenditure on research and development as a share of the country's gross domestic product bounced back to 2.3 percent in 2011, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research said on Friday.
The figure had been growing steadily from 0.9 percent in 1990 to peak at 2.6 percent in 2008. It then fell to 2.3 percent in 2009 and 2.1 percent in 2010, respectively.
The gross expenditure on research and development hit a new high of 7.4 billion Singapore dollars (6.1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2011, up 14.8 percent from the spending of 6.5 billion Singapore dollars in 2010.
The investment made by the private sector in research and development was up 17 percent year on year at 4.6 billion Singapore dollars in 2011. While the spending by the public sector grew by 11 percent to 2.8 billion Singapore dollars in 2011.
In the private sector, capital expenditure contracted by 24 percent year on year to 467.7 million Singapore dollars in 2011, while manpower expenditure grew by 27 percent to 2.1 billion Singapore dollars.
Raj Thampuran, managing director of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, said the statutory body has built different platforms to facilitate the cooperation and investment in research and development, including the cooperation between research institutions and companies.
In a bid to raise the competitiveness and drive the growth of its economy, Singapore has set a target of raising its gross expenditure as a share of gross domestic product to 3.5 percent by 2015.
The Agency for Science, Technology and Research said that the compound annual growth rate of gross expenditure in research and development in the ten years from 2002 to 2011 was 9.1 percent, reflecting sustained growth in such investments in Singapore.
According to the latest Main Science and Technology Indicators of the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development), the United States spent 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development, compared with 1.8 percent in China and 3.3 percent in Japan. The most research-intensive country or region in the world is Isreal, which spends 4.4 percent of its GDP on research and development, followed by Finland at 3.9 percent, South Korea at 3.7 percent, Sweden at 3.4 percent and Japan at 3.3 percent./.