Is Government R&D Funding Going to the Right Places? A Network View of Technology Investment
South Korea invested 4.55% of its GDP in R&D in 2017 — nearly double the OECD average of 2.37%. With that scale of public funding, how the budget gets distributed directly shapes the country’s technological trajectory. But here’s a question worth asking: do the technology fields that receive the most funding actually connect well with other fields? Or do budget allocation and network structure move independently of each other?
This study uses social network analysis (SNA) on national R&D project data to explore how technology fields are connected — and how that structure relates to public investment. (Yang & Cho, 2023)