NEWS

Looking Abroad: Do Funding Imbalances Affect Foreign Competition?

Lou Fintor

There are growing concerns that uneven funding for scientific disciplines will eventually make the United States even more dependent on competing for increasingly scarce foreign manpower.

"Up-and-down funding creates disincentives for those considering careers in the sciences. We have a tradition of recruiting scientific talent from abroad but as other countries become more globally competitive we will not be able to continue to depend on a pool of foreign researchers," said Sam Rankin, Ph.D., chairman of the Coalition for National Science Funding.

A growing number of countries are moving to check the "brain drain" of their most talented young researchers to the United States. For example, Canadians are hotly debating a number of proposals to stem the flow of their professionals to the United States. It has been estimated that 19 Canadian physicians, 15 nurses, and 2.1 professors and teachers left the country for every one that arrived between 1990 and 1997.

One strategy advocated by a group of Canadian medical schools and health research organizations involves earmarking 1% of total national health expenditures—currently about $1 billion (Canadian dollars)—to funding homegrown investigators, according to Barry McLennan, Ph.D., chair of the Canadian Coalition for Biomedical and Health Research.

In developing countries, the researcher exodus is even more critical. It is estimated that African countries spend $4 billion annually to recruit and pay 100,000 expatriate professionals while 250,000 African professionals have left.

And while the U.S. private sector is expected to fund $190 billion of a projected record $278 billion in national R&D spending this year, the gap between the U.S. and other nations may soon begin to narrow, enticing some scientists to stay at home.

For example, the European Union recently created an innovative new policy to boost science funding by 17.4% over the next 5 years. In Asia, Japan initiated a strategy to promote basic research and increase government R&D investment while the People’s Republic of China established a program to place it among the ten most competitive nations in science and technology by 2010. Finally, the Australian government has implemented a comprehensive national R&D plan doubling research grants and granting tax credits to attract private research companies.



             
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