Dennis NormileChina continued its yearslong run of double-digit percentage increases in spending on R&D in 2019, but the nation is likely to fall short of a long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by this year.
But not hitting the target “should not be considered a failure, as China has been increasing its R&D expenditure over the past several decades at a rate higher than GDP growth,” says Cao Cong, a science policy specialist at the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo, China, campus.
Total public and private science and technology expenditures in 2019 rose 12.5% over the previous year to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($322 billion), the National Bureau of Statistics reported yesterday.