Figure 1.1--"Research and Development" Versus "Science and Technology"
As budget deficits and public debt continue to constrain national spending in industrialized nations, policymakers are seeking ways to increase the productivity of the public research dollar. Cooperation among researchers from different countries may provide a way to leverage dollars and increase the productivity of research. The European Union, for example, sponsors the S&T (Science and Technology) Framework Programme to provide opportunities for trans-European cooperation in research that requires investments of a large scale or broad scope. Asian nations also place a priority on international cooperation in science and technology, particularly in areas that support industrial research.
U.S. government policymakers have expressed an interest in increasing international R&D cooperation. In a December 1996 press conference, John Gibbons, Science Advisor to President Clinton, said that as federal R&D budgets shrink, U.S. scientists and program officers should consider expanding international science cooperation as a way to share the cost of developing knowledge, leverage dollars, and increase R&D productivity.[3] While these benefits may accrue to the United States in some cases, they will surely not in every case of international cooperation.
Thus, policymakers need to be able to evaluate when international cooperation is an efficient and effective use of federal dollars. To understand this, policymakers and scientists need to know under what conditions cooperation makes sense, what benefits may accrue to the nation as a result of this activity, and how to monitor benefits over time. Unfortunately, little research exists on ways to track the returns to the nation of investing in R&D, and even fewer studies describe ways to assess the benefits of international cooperation.[4]
The OTA study also identified a number of limitations to participating in international collaborative projects, including the following:
The task of continuous tracking and monitoring of R&D outputs and outcomes is particularly arduous because these programs' progress is hard to anticipate and their results are difficult to predict and measure. Moreover, the results of scientific research are often an intermediate product--new knowledge--which is then applied to reach other goals. As the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) has noted in its report on assessing fundamental science: "Science proceeds through a slow process of accretion of results. Major breakthroughs do not necessarily occur on a regular basis, and an essential element of scientific research is the replication of earlier findings in order to confirm or generalize them."[11] Existing measures described briefly in this report, and more fully in other RAND publications cited later, can capture important elements of research output, but, as the NSTC has noted, significant aspects of research cannot be quantified using straightforward measurement techniques.[12]
Although scientific research is hard to quantify, measures do have a place in understanding the benefits of international cooperation, particularly those related to new knowledge creation. Moreover, international cooperation has a number of goals beyond the creation of new scientific knowledge that provide possibilities for measurement. In addition to the creation of new scientific knowledge, goals for scientific activity, such as access to data and equipment, improved world health, enhanced political relations, and national defense and security, provide fields for measurement. However, ICRD activities are not easily identifiable in traditional budget reporting; activities are decentralized and dispersed throughout the government. Collecting these activities together for the purpose of measuring benefits requires crafting a methodology and criteria for identification.
It has been widely assumed that ISTAs constitute the scope of U.S. ICRD activities. In fact, ISTAs are non-funded, diplomatic-level agreements that have no associated budget authority. Many ISTAs are never fully implemented because of lack of funds from one or more parties. On the other end of the spectrum, individual investigators often collaborate with their international peers without reference to the existence of an ISTA. Relying on the list of ISTAs can actually be misleading when the goal is identifying the range and character of ICRD actually being funded by the U.S. government. Accordingly, this study identifies federally funded ICRD projects regardless of whether they were sponsored by or were otherwise a part of a government-to-government ISTA. While we were aware of the many ISTAs in place to encourage international cooperation, we did not use these as a guide to find ICRD activities. Rather, we sought to identify actual, on-going, federally funded international cooperative activities.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines R&D activities within the federal budget in Circular A-11 as activities falling within these general guidelines:
Agency variations in accounting for R&D result in data that are often difficult to compare. The OMB definitions of R&D specifically exclude the training of scientific and technical personnel. However, the support of research assistantships for Ph.D. research is sometimes included in the "conduct of R&D" as a grant provided by an agency to a scientific researcher. Moreover, R&D data may differ across agencies in the accounting for salaries and indirect costs: These may be included or excluded from the total R&D budget, depending upon the nature of the research or the vehicle for its funding.
Among the agencies, the Department of Defense (DoD) has the most unique approach to accounting for R&D. The DoD reports seven stages of R&D to OMB: DoD budget categories 6.1-6.3 correlate with the OMB definitions for basic, applied, and development R&D--DoD refers to all three categories as "S&T." The DoD delineates budget categories 6.4-6.7 as testing, evaluation, and design activities--DoD refers to these four categories as "R&D." The federal government's $70+ billion R&D budget comprises all seven DoD 6.1-6.7 activities' budgets.
Specifically not counted as R&D within the U.S. government budget are endowments, such as the U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Commission; capital investment, such as the Global Seismographic Network; routine product testing; quality control; mapping; collection of general-purpose statistics; experimental production; routine monitoring and evaluation of an operational program; and the training of scientific and technical personnel. Some of these activities might be considered S&T by a reasonable observer and may involve some international cooperative activities, such as collecting, tracking, and reporting weather data. Nevertheless, these activities are not budgeted as R&D so that they cannot be compared across agencies or tracked from year to year.
The particularities of federal budgeting terms and practices have important implications for this study. To create an inventory of international R&D spending that is comparable across agencies and over time, this project used government R&D budget dollars because these are identifiable, comparable, and traceable data.[15] Figure 1.1 illustrates how the terms are used and where this study has focused its efforts. Figure 1.1 also shows how, in an effort to make the data comparable across agencies, we eliminated the DoD 6.4-6.7 data from this inventory, since these activities generally involve testing and evaluation activities not conducted under R&D budgets in other agencies.
Figure 1.1--"Research and Development" Versus "Science and Technology"
The collection and assessment methods used in this study are designed to allow reproducible and comparable results across a number of cases. The study included four phases: First, we conducted an inventory of government spending on international cooperation in R&D in FY95.[16] Second, we developed a notional list of benefits that might be expected to accrue to the United States in the process of conducting the types of international cooperation in R&D identified in phase one. Third, we examined possible measures for assessing the benefits of these activities, and, with this list, we constructed a framework that matches benefits to measures in a way that would elicit real-time quantitative and qualitative information on ICRD activities. Finally, we conducted a case study to test whether the framework and the suggested measures provided practical, policy-relevant information. This report presents the findings from and analysis of these four phases of the project.
[2]Science Magazine, Vol. 275, February 7, 1997, p. 743.
[3]New Technology Week, December 9, 1996, p. 1.
[4]One relevant study is Techniques and Methods for Assessing the International Standing of U.S. Science, Caroline Wagner, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, MR-706.0-OSTP, 1995.
[5]U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, International Partnerships in Large Science Projects, OTA-BP-ETI-150, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1995, pp. 11-12.
[6]Ibid.
[7]Ibid. p. 13.
[8]Report of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, to accompany S. 20, Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, U.S. Government Printing Office, June 16, 1993, 103rd Congress, 1st Session, Report 103-58, p. 2.
[9]Leon E. Panetta, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, M-94-2, Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, October 8, 1993.
[10]Vice President Al Gore, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, report of the National Performance Review, Washington, D.C., September 7, 1993.
[11]National Science and Technology Council, Assessing Fundamental Science, Committee on Fundamental Science, July 1996, p. 4.
[12]Ibid., p. 7.
[13]Research and development is a budget term used by the Office of Management and Budget and applied within government agencies to define a specific form of federal investment activity. In fiscal year 1995 this activity amounted to approximately $70 billion. Only those activities classified by federal agencies as "R&D" are included in this inventory. We recognize that projects and activities outside of the defined set of "R&D" projects might be considered to be scientific or technical in nature, but to ensure consistency, we do not include these activities in this inventory.
[14]For example, the 1995 National Academy of Sciences report (Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology, issued by the Committee on Criteria for Federal Support of Research and Development, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council) uses "R&D" and "S&T" almost interchangeably throughout the report.
[15]The case study described in the appendix sought to include all S&T activities without regard to R&D budgetary classification.
[16]The U.S. federal government's fiscal year begins on October 1 and ends on September 30.