(Yicai Global) May 7 -- China's spending on research and development accounted for over 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product from 2013 to 2019 but the money can be better utilized, according to a recent report.

Central R&D financing jumped 18 times to CNY453.7 billion (USD70.2 billion) between 1995 and 2019, the Dalian University of Technology said. Of that, funding to universities climbed 42-fold to CNY179.7 billion (USD27.8 billion) and that to public research institutions jumped 21-times to CNY308.1 billion.

China has huge research funds but needs to improve the efficiency of how this money is used, said Sun Yutao, author of the report. “R&D funds must not suddenly flood into popular fields. This would be a short-term investment not a long-term solution.”

Investment in R&D from the private sector outstripped that of the government, soaring 55-times over the period to CNY1.7 trillion (USD263 billion), it added.

Room for Improvement

The proportion of the nation’s R&D funds used for basic research climbed to 6 percent in 2019, from around 5 percent in earlier years.

“There is still a big gap with some developed countries who put between 15 percent and 20 percent of their budget into basic research, so there remains room for improvement,” said Wang Jianyu, researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The state will hike research investment and guide companies and non-government sectors to invest more in basic research over the course of the 14th Five-Year Plan from 2021 to 2025, Ye Yujiang, director of the Department of Basic Research under the Ministry of Science and Technology, said previously.

Of the remaining budget, 11 percent is allocated to applied research and 83 percent to experimental development.

Editor: Kim Taylor