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A recent paper by Asteris Chatziparadeisis, presented at the European Conference on Quality in Survey Statistics (Cardiff 24 – 26 April 2006) focuses on the capacity of well-established indicators to capture the progress towards the knowledge-based economy.
The significance of the indicators we select to monitor the performance in R&D and innovation of countries, regions and sectors is major since any good practice and policy model are justified with respect to performance indicators and whatever they measure.
The paper ‘The R&D Indicators in the Knowledge-Based Economy: The Research Paradox’ questions the capacity of GERD to measure research and innovation performance. As Chatziparadeisis points out “Out of all R&D indicators, the older yet more preferred one is the Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (GERD) most of the times expressed by the “r” indicator, i.e. the percentage of GERD on Gross Domestic Product (GDP)…. The capacity of the GERD or r indicator to convey in a reliable way the actual evolution of the R&D sector and of the economy in general, is limited…. A variety of contradictions have been observed between the aforementioned indicators, which we will henceforth refer to as the “Research Paradox”.
Download the full paper: The Research Paradox