It says that from 1997 to 2002, Asian funding from public and private sources rose by four per cent, enabling
In those five years,
"Three countries — Brazil, Mexico and Argentina — account for 85 per cent of the region's [research spending], leaving the remainder with average expenditures of no more than 0.1 per cent of
Arab countries in the
UNESCO director-general Koïchiro Matsuura welcomed the Asian boost but pointed out the need to deliver the benefits of research to the region's people.
"With hundreds of millions of Asian children still living in poverty, the benefits of research and development are still not reaching large segments of the population," he wrote in his foreword to the report.
The report also compares spending per researcher in different regions in 2002. At US$8,900, this was lowest in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which gathers
Spending per researcher in the European Union was US$177,000.
The report recommends that international collaborations between industrialised and developing countries should focus not only on technology transfer but also on capacity building to ensure that transferred technologies can take root.
It adds that although private sector funding is important for research and development, strong national science policies are needed to provide consistent public funding for basic research.
The 2005 UNESCO Science Report is the fourth in a series presenting a periodic overview of global scientific research and higher education.
Link to report table: global research spending 2002
*GRED = gross expenditure on research and development
Link to report table: world researchers 2002