Taiwan’s R&D spending maintains growth trend

2014-10-30

Taiwan R&D spending increased 5.5 percent year on year in 2013, reaffirming the nation’s innovation prowess and commitment to global economic development, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

A total of NT$454.9 billion (US$14.96 billion) was spent on R&D last year, accounting for 3.12 percent of Taiwan’s gross domestic product, up from 3.06 percent in 2012. The results were contained in a survey released Oct. 23 by the MOST.

“We are pleased to see funding keeps flowing into this area,” a MOST official said. “This positive trend gives the R&D activity of Taiwan industry greater depth and encourages firms to focus on cutting-edge research.”

Although the public sector saw a year-on-year fall of 1.3 percent in its ratio of R&D expenditure to the overall figure, the private sector remained strong with a contribution of 76.5 percent.

Taiwan’s private businesses have remained on this growth track in recent years, except for 2009 when they were hard hit by the Southeast Asian financial crisis.

R&D spending was up in the areas of applied and fundamental research, as well as technological development. The latter accounts for the highest proportion of total expenditure at 67.5 percent, while the first two were 23.2 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively.

The survey also revealed an annual increase of manpower for R&D purposes. Taiwan had 232,879 full-time equivalent employees devoted to such work, up 2.2 percent from 2012, and 140,124 full-time equivalent researchers, up 0.7 percent. In addition, for every 1,000 local employees, 12.8 were full-time equivalent researchers.

At 60.2 percent, researchers were Taiwan’s No. 1 source of R&D manpower, followed by technical personnel and support staff at 34.6 and 5.2 percent, respectively. The latter two each achieved significant rises in employee numbers of 4.4 percent and 5.3 percent.

Source: Taiwan Today (http://taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=223418&CtNode=413)