The Burj Dubai—now Burj Khalifa—is a marvel of modern architecture, representing Dubai’s outsized ambitions and fearless optimism. It’s an engineering feat—the first superscraper?—that may augers in an era of buttressed core skyscraper designs. It could also be a pointless example of excess. The one sure thing about building a Burj of such scale is that it represents a terrible risk that, like Dubai’s other, more questionable feats of landscape and real estate engineering, could implode with violent force. We can marvel at the effort, but, as builders of the One World Trade Center in New York City well know, having 2 million square feet of empty office space is a drain that can one day overshadow the accomplishment of the building’s engineer.
The real strength is not the building itself, it’s the know-how to get it done if you need to. In this way Dubai differs from China among countries with outsized ambitions. Dubai seeks investors. In general, China makes things to invest in. Recalling R&D’s global funding report from last year, the focus was on whether global R&D would suffer greatly at the hands of a global economic meltdown. This year, re-emergence is the word, but we must share it with the elephant in the room: R&D from developing nations.
We can’t ignore the trend. While the developed world shuddered at the end of 2007, the developing countries, dominated by Brazil, India and China, capitalized on unabated government support for R&D. But it was not independence from the vacillations of Wall Street that protected R&D growth in these countries; it was a systemic mobilization of educated workers.
One interesting figure revealed by a recent UNESCO Institute of Statistics report, cited in our 2010 Global R&D Funding Forecast, showed that researchers in developing companies have grown from 1.8 to 2.7 million in just five years. That’s a 45% increase that dwarfs the 8.6% growth experienced by developed nations. This trend predates the recession, so it begs the question of whether the global economy—as it stands now—has direct effect on the R&D output of individual countries. Between 2003 and 2006, a period of sustained economic growth, the U.S. actually lost researchers, more even than Russia did. Or perhaps it just reflects the ambitions of the one country that dominated that growth: China.
Some countries, particularly the U.S., took China to task at the Copenhagen summit for insisting that it is still a “developing” country despite world-leading carbon emissions. But what can China say? It’s still developing, adding roughly 100,000 to 200,000 researchers a year, which is more than the entire complement of researchers in India, a country we are also hearing from in a big way.
R&D Magazine has talked about China and its rapid R&D surge in the past, but for the first time it warranted its own section with the vaguely imperial “R&D Giant Ascendant”. The country is still ascending and will soon have ecological and population problems far greater than Dubai’s delicate balance of debt and income from real estate shoppers and luxury hotel guests. But someday soon if you need a new ultra-super-scraper built, you may have to go see a firm in Shenzhen.
