The report, titled the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard for 2017, covers the 35 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an inter-governmental economic organisation. Apart from statistics about digital trends, the report also includes figures about employment and other country traits.
It found that Australia was responsible for a little more than 3% of the top 10 most-cited scientific publications in 2016, behind Canada, Japan and France.
And Australia was found to be the eighth largest producer of most-cited scientific documents on machine learning after the US, China, India, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany.
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The OECD report said that Australian Government budgets for research and development had increased since 2008, showing an increase of 9% between 2008 and 2016. There was strong growth in 2008 and 2009, and a slight decline since then.
Women were said to have invented 8.9% of patents in Australia between 2012 and 2015, compared to 10% in the US and 7% in the European Union.
More authors of scientific material came to Australia than left the country between 2002 and 2016. Almost 7500 more authors came to the country than left, just behind Switzerland and the US and marginally ahead of China.
Government support for business R&D was second highest in Australia in 2015, the report said, with almost 87% of total support. Only the Netherlands had more government support for business R&D. The Australian figure was up from 65% in 2006.
On the global front, the OECD report said China, Chinese Taipei, Japan, South Korea and the US accounted for 70% to 100% of the 20 fastest growing new ICT technologies, such as payment protocols or interactive TV over 2012-15, as measured by inventions patented in the five top intellectual property offices.
Both South Korea and Japan led in robot intensity, the number of robots used in a sector divided by the overall value created by that sector. Robot intensity is rising in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic and Slovenia, and in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), most notably in China which is fast catching up to US levels.
The report said use of the Internet of Things was growing fast with China having the most SIM cards in machines in 2017 at 228 million subscriptions, accounting for 44% of global machine-to-machine connections and three times that in the US.
In terms of such cards per person, New Zealand was second after Sweden, well ahead of the US and UK. Australia stood below the OECD average.
When it came to artificial intelligence technologies patented in the five top IP offices, there was a rise of 6% year-on-year over 2010-15, led by Japan which, along with South Korea and the US, accounted for more than 62% of AI-related patent applications, down from 70% in 2000-05 as filings rose from China and Chinese Taipei.
EU countries contributed to 12% of the top AI inventions, down from 19% in the previous decade.
The US led the OECD in the share of the world’s top 10% most-cited scientific publications while China overtook the UK to take second place after tripling output in a decade. The US share of top-cited research fell from 38% in 2005 to 26% in 2016, the UK slipped from 8% to 6% and China rose from 4% to 14%.
On the employment front, the report said Australia had made large employment gains between 2010 to 2016, with about a million new jobs. In 2014, 20.7% of jobs were sustained by foreign demand, up from 18.9% in 2004. This was the lowest in the OECD, apart from Japan and the US.
Australian women earned about 13% less than men when individual and job-related characteristics were taken into account; this dropped to 11% when skills differences were factored in.