US still reigns over China in tech race, but gaps are quickly closing: Harvard report
Contrary to other global trackers, university’s tech race scorecard puts US in front in critical fields with China gaining from ‘research achievements, human capital’
The authors of the Critical and Emerging Technologies Index, released by the university’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, said the US maintained its competitive edge because of large-scale American public and private investment, a top-notch and diverse research workforce, and a decades-old decentralised innovation ecosystem.
To quantify the global tech race, the index assigned considerable weight to private and public funding resources – a US advantage not captured by trackers focusing on research output, such as the Nature Index and the Critical Technology Tracker, created by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Both of these have pointed to China as the leading country in many research fields, according to the team.
13:01
Why is China’s gruelling gaokao college entrance exam so tough?
The index – maintained by the highly regarded journal Nature – ranks institutions based on their contributions to articles published in the world’s most influential science journals.