The Growth of Science and Economic Development

Abstract

While most indicators of scientific activity have been shown to be growing through time at an exponential rate, a cross-sectional analysis suggests that scientific growth does not greatly outstrip economic growth. Power functions relating percentage increases between variables in a linear or non-accelerating fashion were found to approximate the relationship between scientific and technical publications in 1961 and five indices of the early '60's level of economic development better than several other function types, including the exponential. Depending on the economic development index used, a 10% increase in the latter was found to be associated with an increase of between 7.5% and 12.5% in scientific and technical publishing. A table of residuals or nation-by-nation deviations of the actual publications scores from two of the fitted power functions is included to suggest other variables which would have to be introduced into a fuller model of scientific growth.