Independent rankings built from public data — every figure traceable to the body that published it.
Report year 1998Data year 1998
Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (% of GDP)Higher is better — rank 1 leadsPublished by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
28 editions (1996–2023), 52 to 102 countries. Gross domestic expenditure on research and development as a share of GDP, counting business, government, higher education and non-profit spending together. The standard measure of how much of an economy is aimed at producing new knowledge, and SDG indicator 9.5.1. ⚠ It counts money in, not discoveries out — Israel leads 2023 at 6.35%, which says what the country spends and nothing about what it found. ⚠ Editions reporting fewer than 50 countries are not written — that drops UIS’s trailing stub year, which opens with a handful of early reporters, and any thin historical year. ⚠ UIS ranks nobody, so no rank is stored; the POSITION on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score and labelled as ours.
Research and Development Spending 1998 — UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
Cite as: UNESCO Institute for Statistics. UIS Data Browser. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
UIS release 20260507-91260335. Read from the UIS API at full precision, as published — nothing is rounded here. ⚠ Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so anything derived from it carries the same ShareAlike obligation. UIS publishes no rank, so none is stored and none is derived here.
66 rows × 3 columns · imported from the publisher’s published data file on
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| Country | ISO Code | Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (% of GDP) |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | JPN | 2.8275 |
| Israel | ISR | 2.8072 |
| Finland | FIN | 2.7854 |
| United States | USA | 2.4962 |
| Germany | DEU | 2.2075 |
| France | FRA | 2.1034 |
| South Korea | KOR | 2.0361 |
| Denmark | DNK | 2.0075 |
| Iceland | ISL | 1.9510 |
| Belgium | BEL | 1.8383 |
| Austria | AUT | 1.7411 |
| Netherlands | NLD | 1.7397 |
| Singapore | SGP | 1.7371 |
| Canada | CAN | 1.7105 |
| United Kingdom | GBR | 1.5478 |
| Australia | AUS | 1.5135 |
| Slovenia | SVN | 1.3103 |
| Ireland | IRL | 1.2080 |
| Ukraine | UKR | 1.0699 |
| Czechia | CZE | 1.0542 |
| Italy | ITA | 1.0028 |
| Russia | RUS | 0.9538 |
| Spain | ESP | 0.8487 |
| Slovakia | SVK | 0.7623 |
| Belarus | BLR | 0.7058 |
| India | IND | 0.7038 |
| Serbia | SRB | 0.6976 |
| Poland | POL | 0.6575 |
| Hungary | HUN | 0.6561 |
| China | CHN | 0.6419 |
| Portugal | PRT | 0.6249 |
| Saint Lucia | LCA | 0.5740 |
| Estonia | EST | 0.5650 |
| Lithuania | LTU | 0.5414 |
| Cuba | CUB | 0.5012 |
| Romania | ROU | 0.4954 |
| Bulgaria | BGR | 0.4822 |
| Hong Kong | HKG | 0.4283 |
| Azerbaijan | AZE | 0.4213 |
| Argentina | ARG | 0.4113 |
| North Macedonia | MKD | 0.4084 |
| Malaysia | MYS | 0.3979 |
| Latvia | LVA | 0.3897 |
| Türkiye | TUR | 0.3620 |
| Georgia | GEO | 0.3538 |
| Bolivia | BOL | 0.2950 |
| Mexico | MEX | 0.2852 |
| Panama | PAN | 0.2828 |
| Costa Rica | CRI | 0.2653 |
| Mauritius | MUS | 0.2583 |
| Kuwait | KWT | 0.2580 |
| Morocco | MAR | 0.2458 |
| Armenia | ARM | 0.2260 |
| Kazakhstan | KAZ | 0.2204 |
| Kyrgyzstan | KGZ | 0.2106 |
| Cyprus | CYP | 0.2033 |
| Egypt | EGY | 0.1991 |
| Uruguay | URY | 0.1919 |
| Mongolia | MNG | 0.1664 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | TTO | 0.1272 |
| Pakistan | PAK | 0.1092 |
| Peru | PER | 0.1007 |
| Madagascar | MDG | 0.0938 |
| El Salvador | SLV | 0.0882 |
| Ecuador | ECU | 0.0652 |
| Myanmar | MMR | 0.0342 |