(Yicai) March 10 -- The average annual growth rate of China's research and development expenditure is expected to exceed 7 percent during the 14th Five-Year Plan, according to a recent report by Dalian University of Technology.

China's leading advantage over Japan and Germany in terms of total R&D spending has further expanded during the five-year period that started in 2021, but there is still a significant gap with the United States, according to the report, which was compiled by DLUT's professor Sun Yutao.

The National Bureau of Statistics announced on Jan. 24 that China's total expenditure on R&D exceeded CNY3.61 trillion (USD498.3 billion) last year, up 8.3 percent from the previous year, with the investment in basic research climbing 10.5 percent to CNY249.7 billion (USD34.4 billion). The R&D intensity inched up 0.1 percentage point to 2.68 percent in the period.

In the global economic situation, the scale and intensity of China's R&D investment remains stable, Sun told Yicai, adding that maintaining growth is not an easy task.

In recent years, the proportion of funds China allocated to scientific research to its total R&D expenditure slightly decreased, despite the government continuing to focus on it, the report showed. In the future, China should increase scientific research funds for universities and research institutes and encourage enterprises to conduct basic and applied research based on common industrial technologies.

In 2022, China's R&D investment scale ranked second worldwide but was not even half of that of the US in first place. However, it was 3.6 times that of Germany, 3.2 times that of Japan, and 2.2 times that of the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Italy, according to the report.

The three Chinese provincial-level regions with the highest R&D spending in 2023 were Guangdong province, Jiangsu province, and Beijing, which accounted for nearly 36 percent of the country's total, data from the report showed. They respectively invested CNY480 billion, CNY421.2 billion, and CNY294.7 billion in R&D that year.

In terms of regions, central China saw its R&D expenses contribution to the nation increase to 18.2 percent in 2023 from 17.9 percent in 2020, according to the report. Meanwhile, the proportion of northeastern China fell to 3.4 percent from 3.6 percent.

Eastern and western Chinese regions maintained their contribution ratios in the period, at around 65 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

Enterprises have been China's main investors in R&D, with their contribution increasing to 79 percent in 2022 from 32 percent in 1995, the report showed. The Chinese government, as the country's second-largest contributor, saw its R&D investment drop to 17.8 percent from 25.8 percent in the period.

Editor: Futura Costaglione