Report Finds Corporate R&D Nearly Doubled in 2000

Public corporations headquartered in the U.S. almost doubled the growth rate of their investment in R&D in 2000, according to new data from the advance estimates of annual U.S. corporate R&D released this week by the Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy.



According to the report, R&D investment in 2000 rose sharply by 9.3 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, increasing from $145.6 billion in 1999 to an estimated $162.7 billion in 2000. The increase reverses a five-year trend of slowing annual percentage increases in corporate R&D investment and approaches the high of a 10.2 percent annual increase set in 1995.



Among the report’s highlights:

• U.S. corporate R&D is increasingly concentrated in two major sectors, information and electronics manufacture and services (I&E) and medical substances and devices. In only six years, these sectors together moved from claiming 55 percent of all U.S. corporate R&D in 1994 to 67 percent in 2000.
• Three major sectors lost significant share of total corporate R&D. Aerospace, chemical manufacture, and basic industries and materials declined from a 21 percent share of R&D in 1994 to only 13 percent in 2000.
• The I&E sector is the principal driver behind the 9.3 percent increase in corporate R&D by the size of its R&D investment in 2000 (47.2 percent of total U.S. corporate R&D investment) and the strength of its increase (16.3 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars). Combined, the non-I&E industries increased R&D by only 3.7 percent in 2000.

For the first time, the report is based on the new North American Industry Classification System rather than the decades-old Standard Industrial Classification, and more accurately updates data for the years 1994-2000.



The full report on U.S. Corporate R&D will be available next Spring, but the 18-page U.S. Corporate R&D Investment, 1994 – 1999 with Advance Estimates for 2000 is downloadable at: http://www.ta.doc.gov/reports/TechPolicy/US_Corp_Est_011015.pdf