Paul B. Vitta
UNESCO Regional Office for Science and Technology in Africa
Nairobi, Kenya
lNTRODUCTION
Whywould Africa wish to bother with R -& D ?The reasons, validuniversally,are two : togenerate knQwled~,and to devise ways of puttingitto practical
Use.
Both are important, but hereI willaddress myself onlytothe
second. Even then, Iwin
confinemyselfonly to two themes : fundini and alWlication of R&D in "Africa " - a term I wiU use as shorthand for sub-Saharan Africa.DJNDING OF R&D
Technology and Economic growth
Until the turn of the last century, economies grew almost entirely through increases in the productivity of three " factors of production" : lJG,
lab9.r,
and capital. But now there is a fourth :technolQGY.
Inthe developed
economies of NorthAmerica,
Western Europeand
Asia's PacificRim,innovations
intechnology now account
for 20% to 50% of the total growth rates of those economies. Intum, these innovationsare now primarilyproducts ofR&D (rather than, say, of capitalor labor). Because ofthis, inthose economiesexpendi-tures on R&D are an investment; they have definite returns that can be identified and quantified. As an example, in the United States, private returns to R&D expenditure in the private sectorare estimated to be about 20% per year, and social returns 40% (for comparison, bank deposit earn interest rates of about 10% per year).
In Africa, however, the notion of R&D expenditures as an investmentremains a mootpoint.Thequantitativevalues of private and social returns to domestic R&D are largely unknown, for both the private and public sectors. This is why their measurement is, in my view,not only a suitable subjectfor Ph.D. dissertations,butalso avery important one. Meanwhile, impressions, based on isolated anecdotes, are all there is to go by. These suggest that Africa'sratesof converting R&D results into commercial products are extremely low. In tum, this indicatesthat Africa's rates ofreturns to R&D are also low, perhaps less that 1%.
Thresholds of expenditure
Whenever one country spends on R&D a fraction of what another spends, it does not necessarily get the same fraction of the returnsthe other gets. In fact, the other might get some returns while it gets none at all. This would surely be the case if its It R&D expenditures n were all consumed by It maintenance" costs alone, while the other country's expenditures covered those costs
Rl.u
R &Dactivities themselves. In thatcase,one country would have no R&
D activities to expect returns from while the other would have some.
This suggests that there mightbea threshold to R&D expenditures:
above it expenditures yield returns ; below it they yield none. Such indeed is the case.
UNESCO's estimates put the threshold at 1% of GNP~but other estimates put it closer to 2%. By the measure of these estimates, developed countries, which spend 2% to 4% on R&D, should reap significantreturns, and of course they do. By the same token, African countries whose R&D expenditures are 04% of GNP or less, should not, and this is clearly so. For Africa, the thesis thatR&D expendi-tures have a threshold hasthree corollaries, all of them unpleasant.
firM,
in a very real sense Africa's expenditures on R&D ~the waste all of us sometimes suspect them to be. This follows directly from the meanini of the threshold.If the expenditures are below the threshold, then,bydefinition, they are less than the minimum required to generate returns. Therefore theywillnotgenerate any.So,really, the relevant resourcescould be spend more profitably elsewherewithout diminishing those returns, sincealready the returns do not exist. Now ifthis wereindeed so andresources wereJtillspent on R&D, " waste
" wouldbe an appropriate term to apply in reference to the expendi-tures.
Second, the threshold of 1% of GNP (the precise figure does not really matter here) is a relative indicator. It is a fraction of available income, whatever the size of that income. What this means is that the poorest country in the world, no less than the richest, ~afford it. An absolute threshold of course-would be a different matter altogether. For example, few countriesinAfrica could afford the absolute threshold of
$ 2 billion. The second corollary can now bestated. If Africa's R &
D expenditures are below 1% of GNP, this is not because African countries do not have resources equalling that. It is, instead, because theyspend too little on R&D - even aftertheirpoverty has
been
takenfully
intoaccount.Finally, sub-threshold expenditures mean that fewor no real R
& D activities will be carried out. There
Mll
be resourcesfor what Imight call ,. maintenance " - that is , salaries for staff, rent for premises, etc - but there will be none for R&D activities themselves.
The reason in simple :maintenance costs are irreducible, but costsof R ~ D activities are. Staff will not halve their salaries so as to free resources for R
&
D, but R&D activities can behalved ...
eveneliminated entirely - so as to release funds for
salaries.In
short, underconditions
ofsub-
thresholdexpenditures maintenance costs
shouldbe expected
to displace virtually all of R&D activities. In Africa,this
is indeed so.Level of expenditure
Therelative share of one maintenance element, staff salaries (or
" emoluments If), as a percentage of the total recurrent budget for