R&D Investment to Reach 5% of GDP by 2012

The government will raise investment in research and development to five percent of gross domestic product by 2012.

Overlapping R&D projects will be streamlined and poorly-performing operations will be restructured under a strategy announced at the first presidential commission meeting for scientific and technological policies yesterday.

The government will raise R&D investment, including that from the private sector, from 3.2 percent of GDP in 2006 to five percent by 2012. State-funded R&D investment will also rise 1.5 times to create new growth engines.

Despite the higher R&D investment, the government will strengthen its standards to determine which project to invest in and evaluate the performance of each investment project.

R&D projects seeing poor performance or lacking capability will be restructured to raise effectiveness.

Kim Jeong-min, policy coordinator at the Education, Science and Technology Ministry, said, “The government will determine which projects will get less investment by late July.”

In line with the efforts, 107 technology development projects that have been transferred from the former Commerce, Industry and Energy Ministry, Communication and Information Ministry and Science and Technology Ministry to the Knowledge Economy Ministry will be integrated into 49 projects.

Agencies in charge of managing R&D projects including the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology Evaluation and the Planning and Institute for Information Technology Advancement will be merged by function.

Four agencies in charge of energy technology including the Korea Institute of Energy Research, Korea Energy Management Corp. and the New and Renewable Energy Center will be consolidated into one center.

The Knowledge Economy Ministry, which has chief control over government-funded technology projects, will introduce a relative evaluation system to drop R&D projects with poor performance or decreasing need of R&D due to changing technologies.

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