The percentage of spending makes no mention of... The research and development sector to where?

Alanbat-Saba'a Alsukkar

Translated by: Batool Alhajjaj

Despite the paramount importance of the research and development sector in what it reflected on the country's haste of development in all economic and social dimensions, the percentages of spending on this sector are almost nonexistent in so many times, especially since there are no encouraging incentives to nurture competencies and adequate support for specialized institutions for work, research, and development, let's find that the two most important elements of support for the sector (human resources and the availability of funds for this sector) are ineligible.

Economist Wajdi Almakhamrah said there is no balance to support research and development in government and institutions, with exceptions for some institutions and companies, like pharmaceutical companies that are forced to use a large part of their budgets for research and drug development to extract advanced products and then develop them, explaining that almost all of the Kingdom's institutions have a budget for research and development that is "negligible" and that it is only put in place just because they are the names of departments and nothing more.

The majority of the world ' because it is an important element in the formation of advanced economies, and for cutting-edge research to find new products that help the government and the private sector is a positive thing that increases its revenues, predicting that the R&D sector is very low in the Kingdom.

AL Makhamra, in an exclusive interview with Alanbat, called for a review of the R&D budget, particularly in some sectors where developed and new products may be discovered, which could help the government launch its products globally or include them under the intellectual property of these research or new products and publish them globally to achieve positive revenue for the country.

For his part, economist Mazen Irshid noted that the introduction of a system of education based on productive research and development into the culture of society in the Kingdom; It is one way to treat the behaviors of a purely consumerist society, calling for the promotion of a culture of productive research in schools and universities, so that people's progress and prosperity depend on their ability to produce and innovate.

And he explained that the productive research culture required today is not represented by the large number of introduce researchers that have no role in moving the wheel of development but contribute effectively to national wealth and serve the needs of society at the same time, stressing that this can only be achieved through linking productive ideas with available natural resources; it is the way to reach innovative production processes that raise the value of the Kingdom’s exports abroad, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

And he showed that raising the culture of productive research in society comes from focusing on ways to advance national productive work with intelligence and creativity, not through unhelpful effort.

The Kingdom came in ranked 43 out of 129 countries globally in intellectual property rights, which has retreated from what it was in previous years to achieve its lowest score in this year, according to the property rights index for 2022, which came in a summary of policies under the title "protecting property rights : The Input to Promoting Creativity and Innovation" of the Jordanian Strategies Forum. 

According to the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index report released in 2019, Jordan is the country that spends the least on research and development when compared to a group of different countries, with the percentage of the Kingdom's being around 0.3.