sananews.net - In this knowledge-driven world, those countries that have invested massively in education, science, engineering and innovation have progressed rapidly. The divide between the rich and the poor today is simply a “knowledge divide” – those countries that have acquired knowledge in cutting-edge fields and used it to invent new products and processes, and other countries which are simply importers of technology. (source)
Even small countries such as Finland and Austria, with populations of about a quarter or half that of Karachi, have higher exports than Pakistan, a country that is a nuclear power with a population of 170 million. The OIC member-states comprise some 1.5 billion people, about a quarter of the world’s population. They also possess about 70 percent of the world’s oil and gas resources, as well as about 40 percent of the world’s mineral resources. However, almost 40 percent of them are classified as low-income developing countries (LICs). Even the richest OIC member-states are in a state of disarray as far as their contributions to science and innovation are concerned. Only Turkey, Iran and Malaysia have progressed rapidly due to their heavy investment in education, but on average OIC member-states invest only about 0.46 percent of their GDPs in science and technology, compared to the two to four percent spent by the advanced countries. The result is that the gap between the advanced countries and OIC member-states continues to widen with each passing day.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar have largely spent their funds in building luxurious campuses and relied on importing foreign faculty but have failed miserably in developing their own indigenous capabilities. This has resulted in a huge wastage of funds, and only the foreign building contractors have benefited with huge multi-billion-dollar contracts. Not a single university from the Islamic world is among the top 100 of the world, and only a few are among the top 400. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities, only four out of the top 500 universities of the world are in OIC member-states (less than one percent). The R&D manpower per million population in OIC member-states is only 649, compared to 3,780 for the developed countries. (The world average is 2,532.) The OIC member-countries contributed only about 0.05 percent to the patents granted for new products and processes in the USA during the 1963-2007 period. The majority of these patents filed are by non-residents of OIC member-states.
A comparison of patents from Pakistan and other OIC member-states is a shocker! In 2008, 1.85 million international patents were filed. Of these, 5,970 were from residents of Iran, 2,221 were from Turkish residents and only 170 patents were from residents of Pakistan. The majority of patent applications came from Iran, Malyasia, Turkey and Indonesia. In 2009, more than half the total number of research publications from the Islamic world came from Turkey and Iran.
The area to target for the emerging economies is high-tech exports. This requires skilled manpower and a strong knowledge base and it provides the maximum returns. Unfortunately, most OIC member-states are far behind in this area. Indeed, it is remarkable that Malaysia alone accounts for about 86.5 percent of high-tech exports from OIC member-states. Pakistan contributes well below one percent, which highlights the shabby state of affairs in this country.
The global R&D expenditure (public and private) is estimated to be about $1.2 trillion. The developed countries contributed about 96.9 percent of this expenditure with the OIC countries contributing only a lowly 1.8 percent. Contributions to defence expenditure are several times higher. The motivation is mainly for the leaders of these countries to get huge kickbacks from obliging Western companies. In the developed countries most of the R&D expenditure comes from the corporate sector. This is focused on industrial research and leads to promotion of innovative ideas.
Private-sector R&D has been growing rapidly in developed countries and in the emerging economies. Today about 70 percent of R&D spending in China comes from the private sector. It is about 68 percent in the United States, 75 percent in Korea and about 70 percent in Germany, but it is less than one percent in most OIC member-states, including Pakistan. This is due to acute lack of vision in their leaders, who fail to realise the critically important role of private-sector research and development in the nation-building process. Most of the funds spent by governments are wasted, as the expenditure is not linked to any holistic roadmap for transitioning to a knowledge economy.
Many countries have introduced substantial tax incentives to the private sector to encourage joint projects between industries, universities and government research institutions. For example, companies in Denmark are allowed to deduct 150 percent of their investments in co-financed R&D projects in partnership with universities and research centres. Similarly, in the USA, a 75 percent tax credit is given to companies that contract out research to universities. The United Kingdom has established a Technology Strategy Board to support joint projects between R&D institutions, SMEs and industry. Various tax incentive schemes exist in Finland, Belgium, France, Norway, Canada, Brazil, Korea, China, India and many other countries. In Pakistan a 15-year tax holiday was granted to the IT industry in 2001 when I was federal minister for science and technology. That helped to boost IT exports of Pakistan from only $300,000 in 2001 to over $1 billion presently. However, similar incentives were not approved by subsequent governments for boosting high-tech industries. The result is that Pakistan has been left far behind in almost every high-tech area. The decision to slash the funding and programmes of the Higher Education Commission at a critical juncture, when several of our universities were rising rapidly and were ranked in the top 300 and 400 of the world, was a disastrous decision that left this whole sector reeling and on the verge of collapse.
To build a knowledge economy the government must implement the policy that it approved two years ago – to invest seven percent of the GDP on education. Alas, the education policy gathers dust and we spend only 1.8 percent of our GDP on education. As a result we are ranked among the bottom six countries of the world. We should be ashamed as a nation!
The writer is president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, former Federal minister for science and technology and former chairman of Higher Education Commission
Courtesy News
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