Public research and development
subclass of R&D in the public sector
Public research and development (Public R&D) refers to the R&D activities related to public sectors, including governments, colleges and non-profit organizations. Public R&D include academic basic research, applied research and R&D grants and contracts to private sectors, where later two are known as 'R&D subsidy'. Public R&D could be understood as a funder or a performer of an R&D activity. According to National Science Foundation in U.S., in 2015, R&D expenditures performed by federal governments, local governments, colleges and non-profit organizations are 54, 0.6, 64, and 20 billions of dollars, respectively. Meanwhile, industries perform R&D expenditures of 356 billion dollars. Moreover, R&D expenditures funded by federal governments, local governments, colleges and non-profit organizations are 121, 4.3, 17, and 19 billions of dollars, respectively. R&D expenditures funded by industries are 333 billion dollars. In terms of R&D funders, public R&D to private R&D ratio is about 0.5.
Israel is the world leader as a percentage of GDP in public spending in research and development, the United States leads in total sums spent.
Economic impacts
Economists have made significant strides to understand the dynamics of public R&D, along with its cascading effects.
The public source identifies “Public research and development” as subclass of R&D in the public sector. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Public, research and development.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130368470. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Public research and development” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.