Currently, if a country's national income is more, its spending on research and innovation is also expected to be more. This is called positive correlation between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Research and Development (R&D). Most of the Western industrialized nations fall in this category. But in case of Arab countries, the relationship is negative. Most oil-rich Gulf Arab countries rank pretty low in terms of expenditure on research and innovation compared to not so rich Arab countries who are seen to be devoting more resources for it. Most Arab research and innovation output comes from countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan while countries with high GDP like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman etc show low spending.
The Arab Knowledge Report 2009 : Towards Productive intercommunication for Knowledge compiled and published by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Foundation, Dubai in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme highlights the connection between knowledge, development and freedom. It also highlights the close relationship between the demands of development and the building of the knowledge society. Egypt currently has the largest number of research centres (14 specialised government research centres, 219 research centres under the auspices of ministries, and 114 centres at universities). In Tunisia, there are 33 research centres comprising 139 labs and 643 branch research units. Technological research cities are few and are limited to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. Other serious attempts exist in the Arab region, such as the Science and Technology Oasis that functions under the umbrella of the Qatar Foundation and sponsors numerous scientific studies.
The report finds it difficult to gather data from the Arab states and has relied largely on reports from World Economic Forum (2008-2009) to provide a preliminary ranking of Arab countries on the basis of the quality of their research centres' output and also provides a comparison with Turkey and Malaysia, two Islamic nations relatively better placed in matters of research and innovation. The most conspicuous facts reflected by the data are the following:
Qatar obtained a relatively acceptable ranking on the global level and first place among the Arab countries (rank 30), while four Arab countries (Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait) attained middling ranks (42, 51, 52, and 54 respectively) with regard to quality of their research institutions. The remaining Arab nations covered by the report placed lower on the list.
The UAE obtained a relatively high ranking (14) among the 30 top nations heading the institutional technology assimilation list, 0utperforming the comparison countries (Malaysia and Turkey). Kuwait came 28th, surpassing the second comparison country (Turkey). Some other Arab countries (Tunisia, Jordan, and Bahrain) were close behind, coming in at 34th, 35th, 36th respectively, while the rest of the Arab countries lagged behind. The UAE and Qatar also recorded relatively high ranking technology preparedness indicator at the global level, occupying 27th and 29th place respectively and higher than the remaining Arab countries.
The data available on the Arab countries demonstrates clearly that the relationship between the quality of research centres and the number of researchers is not always positive; Tunisia is an exception. Tunisia, Qatar, and Morocco are distinguished by their relatively high numbers of scientific researchers. According to World Economic Forum statistics, Tunisia holds the highest rank for the number of researchers, both among Arab countries and globally, ranking ninth among 134 countries. Jordan, Algeria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia hold acceptable ranks (less than 45th), while the remaining countries hold lower ranks. A recent study that relies primarily on government data from 10 Arab countries shows Egypt as having the highest number of full-time researchers (13,941 at universities and research centres) and that these researchers show the greatest diversity of research interests (agriculture, materials sciences, manufacturing, metals, oil, water, energy, and medicine). In this study, Egypt was followed by Algeria (5,943), Tunisia (5,625), Morocco (4,699), and Jordan (2,223), while the number of full-time researchers was less than 1,000 in each of Qatar (789), Kuwait (634), Oman (548), Yemen (486), and Mauritania (411). On the basis of a survey of nine Arab countries, women accounted for 40 per cent of researchers in Egypt and Kuwait, 30 per cent in Algeria and Qatar, and 20 per cent in Morocco and Jordan. Their numbers fell to as low as between 14 and 4 per cent in Oman, Yemen, and Mauritania. Despite the low percentage of women among scientific researchers, female Arab researchers have excelled globally in numerous fields. Among them are Algerian Asya Jabbar, elected to the French Academy, Jordanian Huda al-Zughbi, elected to the American Academy of Sciences, Lebanese Rabab Karidiya, elected to the Canadian Academy of Science, and Iraqi Zaha Hadid, who has won global awards. The performance of female Arab researchers has also been distinctive in medical and public health research, with females appearing in higher numbers than males in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.
Average Arab expenditure on scientific research does not exceed 0.3 per cent of GDP in most Arab countries, exceptions being Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya, whose spending rates are in excess of 0.7 per cent. However, averages reach 3.8 per cent in Sweden, 2.68 per cent in the USA, 3.51 per cent in Finland, and 3.18 per cent in Japan. Rarely is average expenditure on scientific research lower than 1.8 per cent of the GDP in the European or the young Asian countries. In contrast to advanced industrial states, funding of scientific research in Arab countries depends on a single source—the government. This amounts to approximately 97 per cent of the funding available for scientific research in the region. In contrast, government funding does not exceed 40 per cent in Canada, 30 per cent in the USA, and is less than 20 per cent in Japan. Moreover, in developed countries the private sector spends almost twice as much on innovation as the Government. But in Arab world, the private sector spending in R&D is merely five per cent. The annual share per Arab citizen of expenditure on scientific research does not exceed $10, compared to the Malaysian citizen's annual share of $33. In Ireland and Finland annual per capita expenditure on scientific research is $575 and $1,304 respectively.
The total number of scientific articles published in 16 Arab countries in 2005 was 4,859. Egypt held first place with 34 per cent of the total number of publications, followed by Saudi Arabia and Tunisia with 11.8 per cent, while the percentages held by Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and the UAE ranged from 4.7 to 9 per cent. As such, and following a lengthy Arab absence from scientific publishing that has only recently come to an end, Arabs now account for 1.1 per cent of global scientific publishing. But since 1990, the Arab publishing in Egypt and Maghreb has showed an upward trend. However, citation value of the Arab scientific paper is still very low. Whereas the average citation of a single paper from the USA is 3.82, and from South Korea 1.51, the average number of citations from the Arab region ranges from 0.99 for Lebanon and 0.60 for Egypt, and goes as low as 0.01 for other Arab countries.
Patents are another indicator of innovative performance. Egypt and Morocco lead the Arab countries in this regard, with a total of 500 registered patents per year, whereas the six other countries covered by the study produce less than fifty patents annually. Numbers are available for the patents registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during 2005 and 2006 for only seven countries. Saudi Arabia stands out among these countries with 37 patents, followed by the UAE, Egypt, and Kuwait (around 10 patents each). A review of the period from 2002 to 2006 shows that, out of 13 Arab countries, Saudi Arabia had the highest average number of patents issued, at 14.8 per year, followed by Kuwait and Egypt, and then the UAE, Lebanon, and Jordan. The rest of the Arab countries averaged less than one patent per year. For comparison, the annual average of patents issued during the same period in Turkey was 18.6, in Malaysia it was 74.4, in Ireland 170.8, and in Finland 854.8
Data related to national income of 17 Arab countries show that Arab GDP was $1,042 billion in 2006, and yet annual gross expenditure on scientific research did not exceed $ 2 billion, an average of 0.2 per cent. This expenditure produced only 38 invention patents and 5,000 scientific papers, meaning that the cost of one scientific paper came to around $400,000. This estimated cost for the production of a scientific paper or patent is clearly exorbitant, and weakens the trust of society. In comparison, Malaysia spends on research and development 22.5 per cent of gross Arab expenditure, while Finland spends 1.75 times as much as the Arab region and registers 855 invention patents at the cost of $4.1 million each, equalling 8 per cent of the cost of one patented Arab invention.
Social science remains the “poor cousin” of Arab research and is not paid sufficient attention in knowledge reports on the Arab nation. Maghreb countries show the highest output of social and human sciences research, whereas Egypt and the Mashreq (eastern) Arab countries ar characterised by relative stagnation in this field. The interests of researchers in the social and human sciences focus mostly on literature, law, and history, followed by sociology and then economics and political science. The ranking of the human sciences in published studies supported by Western funding agencies has changed, in that publications in political science, economics, history, and Islamic studies have increased, but those in sociology and anthropology has decreased.
As for the language of research, Maghreb (North African Arab states), have reported gradual increase of research papers in Arabic in social sciences. Arabic-language publications in the Maghreb increased by 60 per cent between 1980 and 2007, while French-language publications formed only 30 per cent. This improvement did not include basic and applied science research, which continued to rely upon foreign languages. Among 34,000 papers published by researchers in the Maghreb during the last decade, French was the most commonly used language, out-ranking Arabic. But in the eastern Arab countries, overwhelming majority of research papers in human sciences were in Arabic.
In matters of cultural and innovative research, the report states that an Arab reads very little annually. The first Arab Report on Cultural Development, published by the Arab Thought Foundation, states that “if we distributed all the books published every year among the population, for every 11,950 Arab citizens there would be one book, whereas there would be one book for every 491 British citizens and every 713 Spanish citizens. This means that the Arab citizen's share in published books equals 4 per cent of the British citizen's share and 5 per cent of the Spanish citizen's. Aversion to reading is connected to a high illiteracy rate, low purchasing power, low quality of education, and lack of cultural development plans, all of which facilitate the spread of easier, simpler, and less costly commercial media whose knowledge content becomes central to mainstream culture.
Compiled by Maqbool Ahmed Siraj
