• Across OECD countries, R&D intensity (R&D spending as a percentage of GDP ) was 2.37% in 2017, a slight increase compared to 2.34% in 2016, but about stable for the past five years. Korea and Israel rank the highest (4.55% and 4.54% respectively), in USA was 2.78, while China continued its steady increase – reaching 2.13% and set to be on par with the OECD by 2020.
• China aims to become the world leader in science and innovation by 2050. Its rate of R&D investment growth significantly exceeds that of the USA and the EU. In 2017, R&D spending (PPP$) of China – $496 billion —was second to the USA's $543 billion and 15% over the EU28's $427.6 billion.
• China plans to be world leader in AI by 2030.
  ​​| Related Megatrends: Geopower; Security; Governance
• In the EU, R&D intensity increased to 2.07% in 2017 compared to 2.04% in 2016 and a considerable increase compared to 1.77% in 2007.
• The EU share of world R&D is 26%. 
  | Related Megatrends: Geopower; Security; Inequalities
• EU countries spend around 2% of their GDP on R&I – ranging from barely 0.2% in Romania to more than 3% in Finland – with the private rather than public sector having the biggest budgets — skewed towards close-to-market product development rather than frontier research.
  ​| Related Megatrends: Inequalities; Geopower
• For the EU area, the return on public investment in R&I is of the order of 20-50%, considerably higher than long-term Euro area government bonds at 3.1%, or the past 10 years of the USA stock market 6.8% annual return.
• Of the 10 most powerful supercomputers, the top two are in the USA, followed by two in China; one in Switzerland ranks 6th, one in Japan 8th, one in Germany ranks 9th and the other three are in the USA. The USA Department of Energy and Intel joined the race for building the world’s first exascale supercomputer.
• EU is developing 8 supercomputers to be operational at mid-2020. They will be hosted at eight centres across the EU. Three of them, precursor to exascale machines (capable of executing more than 150 million billion calculations per second) will be in the top 5 supercomputers of the world. The other 5 will be petascale machines (capable of executing at least 4 Petaflops, or 4 million billion operations per second). They will support Europe's researchers, industry and businesses in a wide range of areas, from fighting climate change to designing medicines and new materials.
• USA invests $249 million in quantum information science, to "ensure sustained American leadership in a field likely to shape the long-term future of information processing”.
• India's digital sector to be a $1 trillion economy by 2023.​​
• S&T opens opportunity for job creation; in India—that has 600 million people under the age of 25, hence, needs many jobs over the next years—it is estimated that a new technology creates 100 new jobs for each 10 potentially displaced. 
  ​| Related Megatrends: Work; Inequalities; Geopower; Security
• 90% of inventions in environment-related technologies originate in OECD countries, especially Japan, the United States, Germany, Korea and France. 
  ​​| Related Megatrends: Natural resources; Climate and environment

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