Paul Wells has been linking to many articles wrt funding (or lack thereof) of the sciences in Canada. I watched a speech by Newt Gingrich the other day who alluded to similar challenges in the United States. He claims that the United States (and I would say the whole G7) where able to take advantage of the training of German scientists who fled Nazism or immigrated after WWII greatly enhanced the domestic sciences. Similarly Soviet scientists who defected and then Russian scientists who immigrated after the end of the Cold War helped supply well trained researchers. Finally, the developed world was also able to attract well trained Indian scientists who were looking to increase their standard of living.
As India and China improve their domestic spending on the sciences this poaching could come to an end. Here is a sampling from the article Mr. Wells supplied.
...Why are the foreign companies, some of whom have budgets larger than India's entire $6 billion R&D budget, moving a sizable portion of their R&D infrastructures to India? I was present in Bangalore, 5 years ago, when the John. F. Welch Technology Centre was set up. When Welch, who then was still GE's chief operating officer, was asked why he was taking this step, he replied: "India is a developing country, but it is a developed country as far as its intellectual infrastructure is concerned. We get the highest intellectual capital per dollar here."
One way to understand what Welch meant is to calculate the number of scientific research publications the country produces per dollar that is spent on R&D in India. Using the data provided by Sir David King (chief scientific adviser to the UK government) for scientific publications in major, peer-reviewed journals (SCI publications), I calculated the number of journal publications per gross domestic product (GDP) per capita per year. The top three nations were India (31.7), China (23.32), and the United States (7.0). John Welch's intuition was right!
My calculation has to be viewed carefully, of course. After all, the percentage of all global SCI publications produced by India and China is less than 2% each. But this also means that if India and China were to increase their science and technology ranks by several fold (which they are perfectly capable of doing) and invest more per scientist (which already is happening), then it is possible for both countries to enhance their competitiveness several fold. Indeed, if we apply Lotka's law of scientific productivity, India's and China's competitive advantage ought to increase by several orders of magnitude as more and more of the most talented scientists return. In this way, by shifting much of their R&D activity to countries such as India and China, the world's industries can greatly bolster the domestic intellectual capital of these countries.
