The Need for Advanced Skills and R&D in the Developing World

              The Latin Americans shouldn't miss the focus on development, education, peace, justice, democracy and human rights. For almost two decades I've been writing online about the importance of these issues for a better life to everyone.   I have a YouTube channel, here is the link.   https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010.       This post is a summary of two articles. The frist was published at https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/local-problems--local-solutions--the-need-for-advanced-skills-an. The second published https://www.ipea.gov.br/cts/en/all-contents/articles/articles/264-r-defficiency-in-brazil

                                           Education is part of the enabling infrastructure required for jobs, social development, and future economic growth. Unfortunately, low-and-middle-income countries face an urgent skills crisis with nearly 70% of children unable to read a simple text by age 10. While focusing on the foundations makes sense, developing countries allocates less than 20% of their government education budgets to tertiary education, and less than 2% of their GDP to R&D. This limits their capacity for advanced research and innovation. By contrast, high-income countries spend more than 3% of their much larger GDP on R&D, in addition to private contributions and far larger tertiary education budgets. Some argue that the developing world's limited higher education and R&D sector shouldn't be alarming, while innovate tech can simply be imported from high-income countries. This argument misses a simple point: local problems often demand local solutions. In high-income countries, where malaria is rare, armyworms don't threaten agriculture, and sweet potatos are not central to the diet, there is little incentive to study these foreign topics. Indeed, new research shows that tech developed overseas are often "inappropriate" for domestic markets. For example, crop pests and pathogens pose major threats to agricultural productivity worldwide. While each pathogen found in the U.S. shows up in roughly 57 agricultural patents on average, those found outside the U.S. appear in only 11. The authors estimate that this innovation "mismatch" reduces global agricultural productivity by more than 40% and increases productivity gap between high-and low-income nations by 15%. Initiatives to bolster advanced skills and R&D in developing countries, such as Africa Higher Education Centers of Excellence, have shown great promise in closing this innovation gap. Since 2014, the program has partnered with more than 50 higher education institutions across Africa to support faculty, training, and R&D.                                                                                                                                                                                    There is a widespread consensus that innovation representsa source of economic development and the transformation of society. Based upon this perception, several countries adopt targets to increase their R&D investments as a way of reaching higher levels of development. The Europe 2020 strategy, for example, stated that 3% of the E.U. GDP should be invested in R&D. In 2017, R&D investments in Brazil as a percentage of GDP reached 1.26%. Although higher than other Latin American countries such as Argentina and Mexico, R&D investments in Brazil are much smaller than in developed countries. Given its relatively low levels of R&D investments, Brazil must not only raise them, but also increase their efficiency in order to convert local efforts into scientific and technological results. However, the efficiency of R&D investments is not a frequent subject in the literature. As a result, in order to measure and compare R&D efficiency indicators, it is necessary to define them first. Brazil produced 3.76 citable documents per US$ million R&D expenditures mainly financed by the government. As a result, the scientific efficiency of R&D expenditures in Brazil is about 35% of Australia's, 50% of China's and 75% of the U.S. The result indicate that the scientific efficiency of R&D expenditure in Brazil is low. Although more efficient than Argentina and Russia, Brazil showed a scientific efficiency of R&D personnel of about half of several countries (including China and Mexico). Although in this article we just point to the problem (and not to its cause), the role of all these factors must be investigated in order to tackle with it.