importance of research in national development

Key Determinants of National Development: Historical Perspectives and Implications for Developing Economies

European Journal of Training and Development

ISSN : 2046-9012

Article publication date: 19 February 2018

Hughes, C. (2018), "Key Determinants of National Development: Historical Perspectives and Implications for Developing Economies", European Journal of Training and Development , Vol. 42 No. 1/2, pp. 164-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-12-2017-0108

Emerald Publishing Limited

Introduction

This book seeks to provide a guide to national development for developing economies throughout the world. The editors and authors explore key issues and challenges associated with national development by examining countries that have successfully ascended to a level that developing countries are striving to attain. They seek to add a road map of sorts to the knowledge base of developing economies to lessen their struggle for economic success and viability to a continuously expanding, global economy. Examining the history of similar countries provides an attainable goal for developing countries to strive towards. This book shows that with focus on the right aspects of national development, developing countries can move forward and enhance the lives of all their citizens, not just a select few at the top.

The book consists of 23 chapters, including the introduction, grouped into six sections. Part 1, titled “Leadership, Governance, Policy, and Strategy”, contains three chapters and describes the importance of leadership, governance, policy and strategy development that shapes a nation’s ability to be successful in creating goals, rules of law and strategies that are applicable and fair for all citizens. In Chapter 2, the authors discuss “Leadership, Governance, and National Development”, providing reasons why good leadership and governance is important to national development. Chapter 3, “Strategic Thinking and Economic Development”, describes why strategy development alone is not enough for economic success and the adaptability through strategic thinking is more valuable. Chapter 4, “Policy Management and National Development”, explains how shifting policies can disrupt the national development process and how a documented transition programme is essential to success.

Part 2, titled “The Public Sector”, contains two chapters and describes the role of the public sector in developing economies. In Chapter 5, “The Public Sector as an Enabler of National Development”, the author tells how important it is for the public sector to meet the needs of the people of the country so that they will support national development. Chapter 6, “The Impact of Sound Public Financial Management on National Development”, discusses how leaders should leverage the public sector resources, mainly taxes, in a way that is beneficial to the citizens and the nation’s development.

Part 3, titled “Culture, Institutions, and People”, contains three chapters and discusses how a country’s culture, institutions and people contribute to its development. Chapter 7, “Institutional Building and National Development”, discusses how institutions are central to accomplishing the vision of a nation through sound processes and systems. Chapter 8, “National Culture and Economic Development”, focuses on the benefits of understanding a nation’s culture to be able to influence its people for economic development success. Chapter 9, “Human Capital and National Development”, offers the cornerstone element of national development, the people of a country, without whom there is no need for national development efforts.

Part 4, titled “Natural Resources”, contains three chapters and discusses how a country’s natural resources must be discovered, developed and sustained for economic development. Chapter 10, “Harnessing Land Resources for Economic Development”, discusses the dilemma of land rights and how difficult it is to navigate property rights issues in the context of economic development needs of a nation. Chapter 11, “Management of Energy Resources for National Development: Trinidad and Tobago Model”, provides a model of how to use a newly discovered resource for national development and to use the lessons learned and recommendations for the betterment of other developing economies. Chapter 12, “Mineral Resource Policy Dynamics and the Contribution of Mining to Ghana’s Development”, provides an example of how mineral resource policies shape the understanding of both critics and supporters of the mining industry.

Part 5, titled “Science, Technology, and Infrastructure”, contains three chapters and examines national leaders’ roles in science, technology and infrastructure for national development. Chapter 13, “The Role of Science, Technology and Innovative Industries in National Development” provides the reader with Asian country examples where national development was enhanced through the advancement of science and technology. Chapter 14, “Information Technology and National Development”, discusses trends in information communication technology (ICT) and the experiences in Ghana when using ICT. Chapter 15, “The Impact of Sound Infrastructure on National Development”, describes infrastructure as the back bone of all countries and emphasizes its importance to economic development.

Part 6, titled “The Private Sector and Financial Markets”, contains eight chapters and discusses how a country’s natural resources must be discovered, developed and sustained for economic development. Chapter 16, “The Private Sector as an Engine of Economic Growth”, shows how for-profit organizations influence financial markets in developing economies. Chapter 17, “The Impact of Global Capital Markets on Developing Countries’ Economic Growth”, provides the reader with an assessment of where the continent of Africa, as an investment option, fits within global capital markets. Chapter 18, “The Role of Stock Markets in National Development: The Case of the Ghana Stock Exchange”, is a case study that explains the history of the Ghana Stock Exchange and its role in national development as it relates to private pension plans. Chapter 19, “The Role of the Central Bank in Reforming the Financial Sector: The Case of Ghana”, provides another case study of Ghana’s banking industry and the impact of financial sector reform programmes on its economy. Chapter 20, “Marketing and Economic Development”, suggests that marketing in developing countries has been neglected and needs more focus alongside fields such as finance and human resources. Chapter 21, “Branding and National Development”, shares examples of countries such as Malaysia and South Africa have used branding to enhance national development. Chapter 22, “Enhancing Service Delivery for National Development”, reveals how the service industry influences national development and the extent to which it outpaces manufacturing and agriculture in developed countries such as the USA and Switzerland. Chapter 23, “Conclusion”, provides an overview of the book with regard to findings that leadership and a clear national vision are essential to moving any nation forward. It provides a succinct narrative of all the chapters and how the content of these chapters can propel developing countries to economic success.

The Foreword by Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas who is currently the Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa establishes the book’s important contribution to national development as turbulence and change continues to create emerging economies within developed and undeveloped nations. This book provides research that crosses multidisciplinary areas of inquiry. It has relevance for economists, development practitioners and scholars, business executives, non-profit leader and politicians, among other scholars. Each chapter begins with an abstract, followed by significant content of their topic, a detailed conclusion and references to support the work. The book’s theoretical and practical insights from leading scholars on national development makes it valuable to both scholars and practitioners.

Key determinants of national development: Historical perspectives and implications for developing economies is a book about emergence, development, growth and national success for a developing country. The book builds upon the authors’ expertise in exploring what has and has not worked for other developing countries to provide a road map with fewer pitfalls for newly emerging countries to follow. Many times while reading the chapters, I thought about the applicability of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how the authors are showing through superb writing and case studies that those needs can be met within these developing economies. The authors have provided historical data and context to support their suggestions and examples. The book provides many models, frameworks and case study of examples that can be applied in other contexts. Yet, they recognize the differences in cultures across countries that must be understood, respected and valued as outsiders come in to assist with national development efforts of host countries. All of a country’s human capital must be considered for national development to truly be successful. This book challenges scholars and practitioners to examine how they think about human capital development as it is essential to every aspect of national development including leadership, governance, strategy, the public sector, culture, institutions, natural resources, science, technology, infrastructure, the private sector and financial markets. Without trained, skilled and well-educated workforce, national development is essentially not accomplishable. Many institutions within a nation “lack an organizational model that fits the strengths and weaknesses of its people” (p.130). This is vitally important in developing countries because people are often a scarce resource, so all of the people’s contributions must be ascertained, valued and leveraged to benefit the nation. Essential to achieving the national development is strategic thinking, which is described as “the ability to learn from the environment while adopting a wider perspective” (p. 34). As leaders attempt to solve complex problems related to national development, they must have the ability to think strategically, but they must also have employees and constituents who also have strategic thinking ability. Teaching and training strategic thinking is a difficult task, but this book provides clear examples and urgency for it to be done. For practitioners and researchers who seek to help with national development within emerging economies or rebuilding in countries and territories such as Haiti and Puerto Rico, this book, which shows how Ghana is evolving, can be a valuable asset. The scholarly studies cited and the historical knowledge and case studies provide a rich empirical landscape from which to build a foundation for national development in emerging economies.

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The role of research in national development

Steve Maharey

Comments at a Council Meeting of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Science House, Wellington.

Introduction

Today I welcome the opportunity to speak to you about the role tertiary education, universities in particular, and the importance research has in the continued growth and development of our country. I also welcome the opportunity to respond to any questions you may have, or comments you may wish to make.

Importance of Research

A substantial and vital contribution to New Zealand’s research effort is made by tertiary providers and the role they play is crucial role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

The Labour Party's 1999 tertiary education manifesto, 'Nation Building: Tertiary Education and the Knowledge Society', was a vision of a strengthened tertiary education research community harnessed to make a significant contribution to the nation's sustainable development.

This government has strong and long-standing commitment to the development of a prosperous and confident knowledge-based society, which recognises, builds on, and values the special things that make New Zealand and New Zealanders what they are.

That kind of society can provide a sound basis for economic prosperity and social inclusion, but it won’t just happen. It will require a persistent, long-term, focus on quality, innovation, continuous improvement and entrepreneurship. As part of this, the people, the organisations, and the management and funding systems, in the tertiary sector need to stimulate, to facilitate, to demand, and to celebrate the highest standards of excellence in research.

Creating Knowledge

Why? Because creating and sharing knowledge is fundamental to growing New Zealand’s knowledge economy and society. We will only be successful in achieving our national goals when the relationship between research and innovation is fully developed.

The Tertiary Education Strategy sets a clear direction for strengthening research, knowledge creation and uptake for our knowledge society. The Strategy promotes the building of research capabilities and the quality of research as well as more effective linkages with business and other external stakeholders and greater alignment with national goals. High quality research will underpin knowledge creation and technology transfer that is linked to the achievement of New Zealand's national goals.

Our vision is for research to be at the forefront of our economic, social and environmental development. Elevating research to a position of high strategic importance within the tertiary education system is long overdue. Over the last decade tertiary education and research has not been made a priority in the way that it should have been.

Universities as leaders of research

This means our focus must be placed on universities as the key leaders along with crown research institutes of basic and strategic research in New Zealand.

Universities contain some of the best brains in the country. They are a wonderful local and national asset. Universities must take a leadership role in the pursuit of an innovative and highly skilled economy. They are also bridges between businesses and the knowledge that can make a difference to their success.

It is essential that we now reposition universities as the institutions to influence the direction and quality of our research and ensure that they become the elite institutions that they were intended to be.

We should be striving towards a research community, which is defined by increased global connectedness and networks with international research peers.

At the same time our tertiary system here in New Zealand should be dominated by collaboration and the sharing of knowledge between tertiary education organisations and other research providers, and the communities that they serve.

Linkages need to be encouraged between other tertiary providers, industry, and other research users. The tertiary sector must take responsibility for engaging effectively with these communities to disseminate new ideas, products and services that will be relevant.

Distinctive Contributions Paper

The TEC has recently released a consultation paper on the Distinctive Contributions of Tertiary Education Organisations. I welcome this paper because it focuses on significant questions about the broad role and place in the system of the various tertiary education organisations. These are questions that we need to be asking in order to recognise the importance of universities and polytechnics and their significant research and knowledge sharing roles.

I also encourage you to participate in the consultation process. It is through debate and engagement across a range of sectors that we will truly achieve a tertiary education system to be proud of.

In New Zealand, research is at the very core of what defines and distinguishes a university. Universities generate new knowledge. They should also have a key role in supporting communities and national development goals through being a repository of knowledge and expertise, questioning existing knowledge and being innovative.

It is essential that we now think about what particular features will characterise universities and how they will best perform in the future. We must ensure that we maintain a high and internationally credible threshold for our universities.

One of the key issues contained within the consultation paper is whether universities need to have a strong postgraduate profile with a considerable proportion of students in postgraduate research. One way of achieving this could be through the introduction of minimum benchmarks.

Another issue is the level to which our universities should be involved in providing sub-degree programmes. Currently the extent to which sub-degree courses are offered by universities varies extensively. In some locations sub-degree programmes act as bridging courses to familiarise learners with study in a university environment. In different locations other types of tertiary education organisations provide such courses. We need to consider to what extent universities should be funded to provide sub-degree programmes and how such programmes relate to our goals for universities within the tertiary sector.

There is also the question of whether universities should be bound by our legislative requirements. Currently legislation states that degrees must be taught be people mainly engaged in research. The question here is does this enable universities to be responsive to the needs of learners and provide relevant and innovative education.

These questions provide a good starting point for us to think about how we want to distinguish the role of universities from other tertiary education organisations. If we are to reposition universities we must work together to achieve a common understanding of the tertiary education system we are trying to build.

Tertiary education initiatives

The government has introduced a wide range of tertiary education initiatives to help build this system.

In the field of research alone, key initiatives have included the establishment of seven Centres of Research Excellence, the Building Research Capacity in the Social Sciences initiative and the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF).

All are central features of the Government's Tertiary Education Strategy 2002/2007.

Investment – Vote Research, Science and Technology

The Government is committed to building the quality and capacity of research. We will invest $212 million of new funding in research, science and technology over the next four years. The funding will increase the number of research partnerships with industry and support New Zealand researchers to participate in international collaboration initiatives.

In particular, this funding will enable research for industry to increase by $75 million over four years effectively supporting the strategic research underpinning the development of new products, services and processes. This commitment to research also means the development of a new International Opportunities Fund available to researchers who have the opportunity to participate in international research initiatives. This will help New Zealand to be a competitive player in the global market for scientific projects.

Advanced Network for Research and Education

My colleague Pete Hodgson has recently announced a new phase of the international super high speed research and education internet link - a super link between tertiary education and research organisations in New Zealand and overseas.

New Zealand Universities, Polytechnics, Wananga and Crown Research Institutes will be the first to benefit from the link.

The link, which will be know as the Advanced Network for Research and Education, will mean users can share information at speeds around 20,000 times faster than dial-up and 400 times faster than domestically available high speed internet. This will enable much greater collaboration between researchers and the multiplication of computing power through the linking of computers across New Zealand and around the globe.

We see this new link helping New Zealand participate at the cutting edge of research, development and education.

Performance-Based Research Fund

This government has also committed an additional $33 million into the PBRF over the next four years – another example of our continued investment in research and research capability. The PBRF is about achieving research excellence in the tertiary sector. It was designed to encourage and reward researchers and institutions at the top of their field.

You will be fully aware that the results of the 2003 Quality Evaluation of the Performance Based Research Fund have put the spotlight firmly on the significance of research. The results are a comprehensive assessment, for the first time of the pattern of quality academic research in New Zealand. Results show that the large numbers of researchers in New Zealand are at a high standard and well recognised internationally. They also reveal strength in many subject areas and in most of our universities, in such diverse areas as philosophy, earth sciences, history, and chemistry. In particular the longer established academic disciplines have extremely productive research cultures.

The 2003 Quality Evaluation provides a sound basis on which to measure improvement to quality and provides excellent information for tertiary education organisations themselves and for their students and stakeholders. It has also raised a number of interesting issues for both government and the tertiary sector about the role of universities and how to further enhance the quality of their research. Looking forward there are a number of opportunities for improvement. We will be working with the sector to support these opportunities.

Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences (BRCSS)

The government has made available $1.5 million per annum for five years to build social sciences capability in New Zealand by filling skills gaps, and producing a larger pool of more highly skilled social science graduates and researchers. This is the Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences initiative (known as BRCSS).

This will link future and emerging researchers to established high quality researchers and provide mentoring and structured development opportunities for emerging social scientists.

It also aims to increase the quality of the social sciences in New Zealand by building a critical mass of research capability and knowledge around focused areas and lift the relevance of social science research by supporting research into areas that underpin national development goals. This initiative has real potential to improve the ability of stakeholders such as industries, communities and the government to understand and tackle issues of national significance.

The TEC has just completed a process of assessing proposals for this new funding. I was pleased to hear that the proposals received not only reflected high quality, but also greater collaboration within the tertiary system and connection with other external stakeholders. These are key change messages of the Tertiary Education Strategy. The TEC is currently negotiating a contract for this funding and I expect to be able to make an announcement shortly on this.

Centres of Research Excellence

Having administered the initial phases, the Royal Society is uniquely aware of government’s commitment to Centres of Research Excellence (CoRE). We will be encouraging CoRE through enabling them to operate at arms length from Government. Ours will be a light-handed approach.

The role of the CoRE is to support leading edge, international-standard innovative research. The CoRE are expected to foster excellence and contribute to New Zealand's national goals – economic transformation, social development, Mäori development, environmental sustainability, infrastructure development, innovation.

The CoRE are expected to transfer the knowledge generated to those who will use it. I believe that the seven new CORE are set up to do that. They cover a range of disciplines – Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Molecular Biodiscovery, Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Advanced Bio-Protection Technologies, Mathematics and its Applications, Growth and Development, and Mäori Development and Advancement.

Like BRCSS, the CoRE, too, reflect this desired shift to stronger linkages with external stakeholders, and greater collaboration and rationalisation within the system. The CoRE are primarily, but not exclusively, inter-institutional research networks, with the researchers working together on a commonly agreed work programme. Being familiar with their first annual reports and business plans, I now look forward to future reports on how well they are achieving their objectives.

Growth and Innovation Pilots

In addition to the areas of research, the government is investing in $27 million over the next four years in Growth and Innovation Pilot Initiatives (Growth Pilots). The Growth Pilots have been introduced to help build the capability of Tertiary Education Organisations to underpin the development of the focus sectors for the Growth and Innovation Framework, namely biotechnology. design and information and communications technology. This initiative was established to assist the strengthening of tertiary sector links with business and to foster greater entrepreneurial culture across the system.

Collaborating for Efficiency

We are further supporting new ways of tertiary education organisations working together with business and industry. Objective 34 of the Tertiary Education Strategy seeks "Improved knowledge uptake through stronger links with those that apply new knowledge or commercialisation of knowledge products" with a focus on stronger connections between research providers and end-users. The question of how these stronger links can be encouraged and whether or not this encompasses a more active commercialisation role for TEIs is now an issue being explored by government agencies and other organisations.

A recent study undertaken by the TEC and Tertiary Advisory Monitoring Unit of the Ministry of Education through the Collaborating for Efficiency project suggests that the commercialisation levels of leading New Zealand TEIs are on par with comparable institutions overseas. The study also indicates that there is a significant capability gap between New Zealand TEIs in terms of their ability to pursue commercialisation opportunities.

Commercialisation is only one of the much wider suite of knowledge transfer activities such as the development of new courses and academic publishing in which TEIs are expected to engage. Changing the culture of TEIs is critical to enhancing this role and, in particular, ensuring that TEIs proactively embrace the idea that new knowledge generated should be utilized for the betterment of society.

In conclusion this government is creating a strong infrastructure and providing resources required to assist the New Zealand grow sustainably and participate on the international scene.

A strong tertiary sector and well-developed research infrastructure are just the entry stakes. We are living in turbulent times where economic competitiveness and sustainability are concerned. New Zealand needs to constantly innovate to reach our national goals.

We must not only learn how to learn better, but we must apply what we know in new ways. The basis of any knowledge society is constant innovation and new discoveries.

SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

Research and development: u.s. trends and international comparisons.

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Executive Summary

Key takeaways:

The U.S. research and experimental development (R&D) performance reached $667 billion in 2019 and an estimated $708 billion in 2020, reflecting increases in all sectors (business, higher education, the federal government, nonprofit organizations, and others) but mostly in the business sector.
Adjusted for inflation, growth of the U.S. R&D total averaged 3.8% annually from 2010 to 2019, well above the 2.2% growth of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) over the same period.
The U.S. national R&D intensity (R&D-to-GDP ratio)—a key measure of R&D investment—has also increased, from the highs of recent years of 2.79% in 2016 and 2.95% in 2018 to 3.12% in 2019 and then to an estimated 3.39% in 2020.
The United States remains the global leader in R&D performance (28% of global R&D in 2019), followed by China ($526 billion, or 22% of global R&D). China’s current average annual rate of increase (2010–19), however, is almost double the U.S. rate.
Global R&D performance is concentrated in a few countries. The United States, China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, France, India, and the United Kingdom jointly accounted for about 75% of global R&D performance in 2019. The global concentration of R&D performance continues to shift from the United States and Europe to East-Southeast and South Asia.
Businesses are the predominant performers (75% in 2019) and funders (72%) of U.S. R&D. This sector performs most of U.S. R&D classified as experimental development, more than half of applied research, and a sizable (and increasing) share of basic research (32% in 2019).
Higher education institutions (12% in 2019) and the federal government (9%) are the second- and third-largest performers of U.S. R&D. Higher education institutions are the largest performers of basic research. Both have experienced declines in their shares of the U.S. performance total since 2010.
The federal government continues to be an important source of support for all R&D-performing sectors and remains the largest funder of basic research. The share of federally funded R&D, however, has been on a path of decline since 2010 (from 31% in 2010 to 20% in 2019), and the share of federally funded basic research has also consistently declined (from 52% in 2010 to 41% in 2019). These declines stem, in part, naturally from the large increases in R&D funding and performance by the business sector in recent years. This trend, however, indicates that federal funding has not kept up with the increases in other sectors.

Scientific discoveries, new technologies, and inventive applications of cutting-edge knowledge are essential for success in the competitive global economy and in addressing challenges and opportunities in diverse societal areas such as health, environment, and national security. Consequently, the strength of a country’s overall R&D enterprise—both the public and private sectors—is an important marker of current and future national economic advantage and of the prospects for societal improvements at the national and global levels.

The U.S. R&D enterprise comprises the R&D efforts of various sectors, including businesses, the federal government, nonfederal governments, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations. U.S. R&D performance totaled $667 billion in 2019 and an estimated $708 billion in 2020, compared to $407 billion in 2010. (All amounts are reported in current dollars, unless otherwise noted.) These most recent increases in the performance total ($50 billion or more each year in 2018 and 2019) are much larger than the average annual increases over the 2010–16 period ($19 billion each year). The main driver of these sizable increases is business R&D performance. Adjusted for inflation, average annual growth in the U.S. R&D total has outpaced average GDP growth for nearly two decades—3.8% compared to 2.2% average growth in GDP from 2010 to 2019, and 2.1% compared to 1.8% growth in GDP in the prior decade. As a result, the national R&D intensity has been on a rising path, from 2.79% in 2016 (a high point at the time) and 2.95% in 2018 to 3.12% in 2019 (the first time the U.S. exceeded 3.0%), and it is estimated to be 3.39% in 2020.

Globally, R&D expenditures have risen substantially since 2000 to an estimated $2.4 trillion in 2019—a more than threefold increase from $725 billion in 2000 (not adjusted for inflation). This expansion reflects the increasing importance of R&D in contributing to economic growth and competition as well as the significant role of R&D in addressing national and global challenges. Global R&D performance, however, is concentrated in a few countries. The United States leads the world’s nations in R&D performance with a 28% global share in 2019, followed by China (22%). Together with Japan (7%), Germany (6%), South Korea (4%), France (3%), India (2%), and the United Kingdom (2%), these top eight R&D-performing countries account for about 75% of the global total R&D. Other countries with sizable R&D performance are (in decreasing order) Russia, Taiwan, Italy, Brazil, Canada, Spain, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Australia.

In this report, a larger gap is evident between the U.S. and China R&D totals than reported in earlier editions. S cience and Engineering Indicators 2020 puts China’s R&D at 90% (and increasing) of the U.S. level in 2017. Updated data in this report show China’s 2019 R&D total at 79% of the U.S. level, and the 2017 comparison has been revised downward to 76%. These changes resulted primarily from a comprehensive update, released in May 2020, of the purchasing power parity ratios used to convert a country’s R&D expenditures to U.S. dollar expenditures as a common measure across all countries. These latest revisions had a more sizable effect on China than on other major R&D-performing countries.

Even so, the average annual rate of increase in China’s R&D total (10.6% from 2010–19) continues to greatly exceed that of the United States (5.6%) and the European Union (EU-27) (5.6%). China’s notable rise in R&D performance and the strong R&D performance by other Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, India, and Taiwan—are the drivers behind the sustained rise of R&D performance in East-Southeast and South Asia. The combined R&D performance across these Asian regions rose from 25% to 39% of the global total from 2000 to 2019, while the U.S. and EU-27 shares declined from 37% to 28% and from 22% to 18%, respectively. These broad trends in the global geography of R&D have been noted in earlier editions of this report and are reinforced by the latest data, indicating that the prospects for a further global shift remain strong.

In the United States, the business sector is the predominant force behind the R&D enterprise (75% of performance and 72% of funding of U.S. R&D in 2019). Since 2010, about 80% or more of the increase in the U.S. total R&D each year is attributable to businesses. Consequently, annual changes in business R&D greatly influence the overall U.S. R&D total. Business R&D performance is concentrated in five industries: chemicals manufacturing; computer and electronic products; transportation equipment; information services; and professional, scientific, and technical services. Businesses perform most of the R&D classified as experimental development (90% in 2019) and more than half of the applied research (58%). The business share of basic research has been increasing significantly in recent years (from 21% in 2010 to 32% in 2019).

The other sectors also make important contributions to the U.S. R&D enterprise but represent a fraction of the spending by the business sector. Higher education institutions and the federal government are the second- and third-largest performers of U.S. R&D. In 2019, higher education institutions performed 12% of the U.S. R&D total, over 60% of which was basic research. That same year, federal intramural R&D—through federal agencies and federally funded R&D centers—accounted for about 9% of the U.S. total R&D. Both, however, have experienced declines in their shares since 2010. (Higher education institutions performed 14%, and the federal government 13%, of U.S. total R&D in 2010.)

The federal government plays a larger role in R&D funding compared to performance and supports all sectors, particularly higher education institutions and federal intramural R&D. The federal government remains the largest source of support for the nation’s basic research, although the share has dropped from 52% in 2010 to 41% in 2019. The federal government is also a sizable supporter of the nation’s applied research—32% in 2019, compared to 56% of the support from the business sector. Despite its widespread role of funding, the share of federally funded R&D has been in decline for most of the past decade. In 2010, federal funding supported 31% of the total of U.S. R&D performance but dropped to 20% in 2019—and is estimated to drop further in 2020. This decline is, in part, a consequence of the large increases in R&D funding from the business sector in recent years, indicating that federal funding has not kept up with increases in other sectors.

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importance of research in national development

Current Issue: Vol. 15 No. 1 (2017)

Published: 2017-07-10

Critical assessment of federal government's bailout in southwestern Nigeria

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The Importance of Research and Development (R&D) for U.S. Competitiveness and a Clean Energy Future

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Michael greenstone michael greenstone nonresident senior fellow - economic studies , the hamilton project.

July 27, 2010

In testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, Michael Greenstone discussed the need for expanded energy R&D investments to help combat our reliance on fossil fuels and promote our country’s future competitiveness in the global economy. The full testimony for the hearing, entitled “Promoting a Clean Energy Economy,” can be downloaded at the link above.

Thank you Chair Maloney, Ranking Member Brownback and members of the Committee for inviting me to testify today. I believe it is critically important that we give greater priority to new and better research and development (R&D) investments, to help ensure our country’s future competitiveness and to pave the wave for clean energy innovation.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak today about two interrelated challenges that our country faces. The first is the stagnation in economic opportunity for many families that dates back at least three decades. The second is the economic, national security, and environmental risks posed by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. The key purpose of my testimony is to discuss how R&D can enable us to begin confronting these dual challenges by creating new jobs for American workers, and fundamentally altering the way we produce and consume energy.

I. CHALLENGE 1: UNITED STATES COMPETITIVENESS

Even before the Great Recession’s arrival, there were legitimate concerns about U.S. competitiveness. A recent study by my colleague David Autor, a professor at MIT, highlights the fact that since the 1980s, the American job market has become polarized between high-skilled, high-wage jobs and low-wage, low-skilled jobs. At the lower end of the labor market wages have stagnated or declined. Between 1979 and 2007, real earnings for high school graduates with no further education declined by 12%, and earnings for high school dropouts declined by 16%. During the same period, earnings for those with a college degree or better have increased by 10% to 37%.

At the same time, male labor force participation rates declined between 1979 and 2007 for all education levels, but especially among less-educated men. Employment to population ratios for high school dropouts and graduates declined by 12% and 10% respectively. In many cases, this detachment from the labor force reflects a judgment that individuals cannot earn enough to support their families.

Higher Education and Its Role for National Development. A Research Agenda with Bibliometric Analysis

Published: 18 April 2023
Volume 54 , pages 125–143, ( 2023 )

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Nguyen Thi Hoai Trinh ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9548-2692 1

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The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the literature on the function of higher education and extract significant insights using the VosViewer and Citespaces tools. The findings reveal that higher education is a substantial worry for scientists, particularly in 2015–2019. Furthermore, research indicates a significant body of knowledge on the function of higher education in national development related to human resources, economic growth, and other social issues. Finally, the research suggests strategies for promoting higher education’s involvement in meeting the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Challenges and strategies for the internationalization of higher education in low-income East African countries

The influence of geopolitics on research activity and international collaboration in science: the case of Russia

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Introduction

Throughout the development of humanity, especially in the recent period when the knowledge economy is the choice of most countries, education plays a vital role as a key factor and a driving force for economic development. Education and training are not only prerequisites for economic development, but they also contribute to socio-political stability and finally, education and training contribute to raising the human development index.

Studies on economic growth have long recognized that human capital is important to economic growth and that education is the primary way to accumulate human capital. Major changes in economic structures, industries, and international labor markets have resulted in a demand for rapid knowledge development as well as flexibility and career mobility for individuals. The accumulation of knowledge and technological development make individual workers more flexible in adapting to new careers. Therefore, integrated labor skills and competencies are necessary conditions for workers to succeed in today’s workplace, and this can only be achieved through being educated and trained.

Higher education is a production chain whose output is qualified human resources, serving as a foundation for forming and developing the innovative capacity to serve the country's development and contribute to human knowledge. Based on such a view, in addition to developing the higher education system to meet the learning needs of the society, higher education needs to enhance the position of higher education institutions with others in the region and around the world. To accomplish such tasks, higher education needs to be aware of its role and has positive solutions to promote the role of higher education, contributing to creating a quality workforce that meets the country's comprehensive development conditions.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the role of higher education based on mining scientific texts to explore the change of research trends over time and geography and identify potential future trends. To achieve this goal, the author uses two main tools, Vosviewer (Cicea, 2020a ) and Citespaces, to analyze the data searched from the Web of Science.

The article is structured into five main parts: the first part, the author will introduce the research content and primary purpose of the article, the following section reviews the literature to get a general picture of higher education and find gaps from previous studies. Then, the research methods section will present how to identify scientific data sources, data processing tools and synthesize databases suitable for research purposes. Then, from the research method, the author gives the results and discusses, on that basis, the author finally proposes several suitable solutions to improve the role of higher education in the country.

Literature Review

In a society full of differences, with diverse ideologies and opinions, the term “higher education” is understood in many different meanings. Diversity of opinion is inevitable, and many consider it necessary. However, we aim to discuss and learn about quality in higher education. It is a multidimensional term (Elton, 1998 ; Krause, 2012 ). According to some studies (Barnett, 1992 ), higher education is a production line whose output is qualified human resources. In this view, higher education is a process in which learners are conceived as products supplied to the labor market. Thus, higher education becomes an "input" creating the development and growth of commerce and industry; besides, higher education is a condition to expand opportunities in life for learners. According to this approach, higher education is seen as an opportunity for learners to participate in personal development through regular and flexible learning modes.

In the era of globalization, governments worldwide focus on education for sustainable development, the prerequisite is the development of a sustainable economy. Furthermore, education is an investment in human resources. Because human resources from higher education have high skills and knowledge, in the context of globalization and the knowledge economy, investment (especially in higher education) is a key driver of economic development (Vasilescu, et al., 2004 ). This investment will affect the lives of people in a country (Trinh & Cicea, 2019 ), such as increasing the gross national income of a country (Soyer, et al., 2020 ), and highlight competitiveness in higher education as it enhances welfare and economic performance (Januškaitė & Užienė, 2018 ). In addition, a great deal of literature indicates that the global trend towards a highly skilled workforce can be a powerful driver, strengthening knowledge transfer, international cooperation, and innovation (Siekierski, et al., 2019 ). This trend influences countries' reputation, competitiveness, and wealth and encourages them to pay attention to the quality of life and contributions to a sustainable and balanced society (Pedro, Leitão, & Alves, 2020 ).

Most of the previous studies have only presented or studied the role of education in general. In addition, many studies have presented only the role of higher education in a specific aspect. Therefore, for a comprehensive review, this study synthesizes the main roles of higher education based on a literature review of previous studies, in order to clearly state that: Higher Education provides a foundation for development, the groundwork on which much of our economic and social well being is built. It is the key to increasing economic efficiency and social consistency (Ozturk, 2001 )

The uniqueness of this paper is that it is the first to use bibliometric analysis to assess the role of higher education for each country.

Research Methodology

The bibliometric approach involves identifying scientific knowledge in a particular field and based on the use of specialized software, to discover trends/patterns belonging to the specialists who have studied that issue (Cicea, 2020a ).

Determine the Scientific Source

This article uses statistical tools to identify publications related to the topic, then uses bibliographic analysis to study scientific documents.

In the various scientific databases in the world, the top two databases, which are superior to the others (by the number of articles, coverage area, and prestige), are Scopus (provider—Elsevier) and Web of Science (provider—Clarivate Analytics)). To avoid error-prone redundancy when analyzing scientific papers, the author only considers one database: Web of Science (Cicea, 2020b ).

Determine the Object for the Analysis Progress

Based on the advanced search engine of the Web of Science database, the author uses the keyword “higher education” in combination with the keywords “human capital”, “economical”, “Social”, and “inequality” in the title of the scientific publication. After the initial database is created, the authors refine the result (eg. Choose the documents written in English; only consider the documents in the particular field such as articles, conference proceedings, reviews, book, and book chapters; eliminate all documents written in 2021 because it is not a complete year)

Analysis and Synthesis of Evidence

Based on the created database, the analysis was performed using the Web of Science tools. The analysis considers several dimensions—The category and distribution, the temporal dimensions, the geographical dimensions. After that, the author uses VOSViewer software to draw a map of text data. The minimum occurrence number of a term is set at 10. Next, the author analyzes terms appearing on the visual map through the cluster, size, number of links, and link strength.

Then, the author uses Citespace on the filtered results from WoS with specific customizations such as “Look back year” = 15; “Time Slicing” from 1/2000 to 12/2020; g-index with k=25. In addition, the author examines possible sources such as Title, Abstract, Author Keywords, and Keyword Plus along with the Term source. Choosing the node kinds will provide each related result, which will assist the author in answering queries about the co-citation network's current references, journals, authors, academics, nations, and research trends through keywords.

Results and Discussion

Overview regarding the category and distribution of scientific literature.

The initial search result on Web of Science showed 1804 scientific bibliographies. After the refining process, there were 1530 documents related to the article’s purpose. Specifically, 1530 scientific documents cover 107 study areas. "Education Educational Research" topped the table with a staggering 54.771% (838 articles), followed by “Economics” with 9.542% (146 documents). The remaining study subjects accounting for more than 2% are presented in the Table 1 below.

We are taking a further analysis of publishing units. Journals and conference proceedings with more than 15 published documents are shown in the Fig. 1 below.

Source: Authors own conception, based on Web of Science

Publications with over 15 scientific documents.

The Temporal Aspect

Figure 2 shows the number of studies distributed between 2002 and 2020.

Source : Authors own conception, based on Web of Science

Temporal distribution of scientific documents.

As can be seen in a time distribution chart, before the 2000s, higher education issues received little attention. There are only 1 to 14 scientific papers per year (peaking in 1979). During the first eight years of the 3rd millennium, the number of scientific texts per year increased but not significantly. From 2009 onwards, there was an explosion in the number of scientific texts (31 papers in 2009 and 82 papers in 2011—almost six times more than six years earlier). After that, the number of scientific papers continuously increased and peaked at 172 papers in 2019.

The geographical Dimensions

In terms of geographical distribution of articles, it was made after the affiliation of the first author of each article (Cicea & Marinescu, 2020 ), there are 105 countries interested in higher education research. The chart below shows countries with more than 20 documents on higher education (Fig. 3 ).

Countries with over 20 scientific documents.

The US dominates the chart with 335 studies 1.75 times more than the UK - 191 studies. In general, it can be seen that countries in Europe are interested in the issue of higher education; up to 9 European countries have more than 20 research on higher education.

A more visual map of the worldwide distribution of studies is shown in Figure 4 .

Geographic distribution of scientific production.

The Scientific Terminology

The analysis uses VOSViewer software, which analyzes and maps keywords of their associations, and frequencies based on similarities and interdependencies. The following Table 2 gives information about the top keywords with a frequency greater than 15.

Each cluster consists of similar keywords and has a keyword representing that cluster (based on frequency and number of links). A visual map of each keyword and link is shown in Fig. 5 .

Source: Author own conception, based on VOSViewer

Keywords and their links.

By consider higher education as the centre, the keywords with the greatest link strength with higher education are listed in the Table 3 . For each study, keywords describe information representing the study, attracting the researchers’ attention (Zhang, 2011 ).

According to the table, there are 17 keywords strongly associated with higher education. However, up to 40% are keywords related to aspects of society, proving the great influence of higher education on society. At the top of the table is “inequality”, which is one of the issues the author will address in the next part of the study.

After identifying keyword trends, the author uses Citespaces software to analyze co-citations in each country. The slice consists of 105 nodes with 168 links; the node size represents the number of citations, the number of rings represents the number of years cited (more rings represent the number of citations spanning many years). Each color represents a year, which is described in Fig. 6 . Thus, the results show that most countries with a high number of co-citations are developed economies, having the leading universities and prestigious educational institutions such as the US, China, UK, Australia.

Source : Author’s analyze base on Citespace

Co-citation network visual map of countries.

The evaluation of scientific literature helps to identify keyword trends and find countries that are strongly educating on the issue the author is researching. At the same time, it is imperative to identify journals with high citations on higher education issues because identifying journals with high cross-citation will identify current trends of interest among scientists. Table 4 presents the top 20 journals with high citations from 2000 to 2020.

According to Table 4 , the research problem of this paper is mostly cited by journals related to higher education; there are a few that are social journals, such as the Harvard Business Review. From 2018 through 2020, this problem is not only limited to specialized journals but also mentioned in interdisciplinary journals with a citation index of 4.16 in only two years, 2018-2020; The interdisciplinary journal PLOS ONE has the potential to explode in citations in the future.

The Role of Higher Education in National Development

In some countries trying to shift their traditional economy to a more knowledgeintensive platform, experience in transforming the higher education system has much to do with development (Azman et al., 2013 ). Furthermore, higher education, and universities in particular, serve as an essential force for technological innovation and long-term economic growth in society (Zhu et al., 2018 ).

Higher Education and Human Resources

Humanity has entered the 4.0 era; knowledge has become the most important factor for economic development through the ability to improve labor productivity, which is considered a competitive advantage of the country (Porter, 1990 ). The shift of society towards a knowledge-based economy shows that knowledge drives economic growth and development (IIEP, 2007 ). Higher education is a cradle to create knowledgeable human resources to promote social development. Whether a country has a fast or slow growth rate is determined by the capacity of human knowledge resources. Therefore, higher education plays an important role in enhancing people's capacity to acquire and use knowledge (Campbell, 2011 ). Higher education can help economies keep up or keep pace with advanced technology in the world in the knowledge economy. Higher education graduates are more likely to be aware and better positioned to use new technologies. They are also more likely to develop new tools and skills themselves. Their knowledge can also improve their skills, while the greater confidence and know-how inculcated by advanced learning can generate entrepreneurship, with positive effects on creative work.

Today, when society “opens up,” the transfer of gray matter from one country to another has more optimal conditions and is seen as a trend. Moreover, qualifications are the key that opens the door (Brown & Scase, 1994 ) so that people can be recruited. As a result, obtaining a college degree increasingly resembles getting an insurance policy. Each individual is encouraged to obtain the highest degree possible in order to minimize personal risk. Thus, it can be argued that higher education provides relatively good protection against unemployment (Kivinen & Ahola, 1998 ); (Aamodt & Arnesen, 2021 ). Reaffirm that university graduates will enter society as members of “the energetic society”, which is necessary to achieve sustainable development goals (Hajer, et al., 2015 ).

Higher Education and Economic Growth

It is widely recognized that education has a significant positive effect on economic growth. Schultz argues in human capital theory that education can help accumulate people’s human capital to enhance their productivity in the labor market (Schultz, 1961 ). This argument has been confirmed by empirical research in different countries and regions (Barro & Lee, 1994 ). Higher education fosters high-quality labor to increase the productivity of the whole society and promotes technological and institutional innovation to improve production efficiency (Lucas, 1988 ); (Romer, 1990 ); (Aghion & Howitt, 1990 ). The change for human resources, technology, and institutions will transform the economic structure of that country. Therefore, all possible effects of higher education on people will ultimately impact economic development, as the labor force is one of the basic factors in production (Yang, 2009 ).

According to some previous classic studies (Barro, 1991 ; Mankiw et al., 1992 ) have shown a meaningful relationship between education and economic growth. These studies often use the number of years of schooling of the working-age population as a variable for education. The results of these studies are summarized in Table 5 .

Sustainable development has become a common goal of most countries and is a global trend towards development that can meet the present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In particular, green growth is considered important content of sustainable development, requiring growth to ensure the harmony of all three main areas: economy—society—environment, simultaneously and harmoniously solving environmental and development issues. However, in recent years, environmental degradation with a global shortage of resources has posed an unprecedented and severe threat to human development. This threat has raised people’s awareness of the need to protect the environment. In this case, the limitations of traditional GDP become apparent. On the one hand, human economic activities have positively impacted society by creating wealth; on the other hand, similar activities have brought about adverse effects by hindering the development of social productivity in many ways (Gao et al., 2019 ).

Therefore, countries move towards green growth to overcome the disadvantages brought about by the traditional growth process.

The concept of “green growth” has now been introduced by many organizations around the world. For example, the World Bank (WB) says: “Green growth is efficient in the use of natural resources; clean in minimizing pollution and environmental impacts; flexibility in adapting to natural hazards; management of the environment and natural capital in disaster prevention” (World Bank, 2012 ). According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "green growth includes promoting economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services for our prosperity. For this to happen, green growth must be the catalyst for investment and innovation, the basis for sustainable growth, and new economic opportunities" (OECD, 2014 ). Thus, Green Growth emphasizes promoting economic growth while maintaining balance with the ecological environment, while Green Economy places more emphasis on the limits of the environment, human well-being, and social justice (UNITAR, 2012 )

Through previous studies, it can be confirmed that higher education plays a huge and vital role in developing a country by providing quality human resources to meet market demand and a competitive economy.

It can be summarized in Figure 6 :

Besides providing quality human resources, higher education also promotes economic development by accelerating industrial optimization and upgrading industries from labour-intensive to capital-intensive, and ultimately knowledge and technology-intensive (Min, 2017 ). The timely optimization of industrial structures is of great significance for economic progress and for ensuring the smooth and sustainable operation of the green economy, in which countries can reduce consumption of energy resources and control costs in the environment. Indeed, among the many factors that influence industrial upgrading, welltrained workers with sufficient knowledge and skills are those who can adapt well to industries where advanced technology makes a fundamental difference. Therefore, higher education, by attracting talented people who are pursuing knowledge and skills, is an essential prerequisite for industrial upgrading. In this way, higher education plays a leading role in the industrial restructuring of the economy to achieve sustainable economic growth (Gao et al., 2019 ) (Fig. 7 ).

Source : Gao et al., 2019

Mechanism of how higher education influence green GDP.

Thus, higher education is considered a bridge between the supply and demand of human resources, and universities are the source of green human resources for the labor market. Through this human resource, universities will contribute to promoting green growth by changing the way of life, production, and consumption. In addition, the highly qualified and skilled human resources from these green universities will help green the country's economic growth model towards sustainable economic development.

Higher Education and Social Issues

The ultimate purpose of investing in education is also to improve people’s living standards. Therefore, the level of local human capital and the relative importance of educational institutions are expected to improve the quality of life in an area for several reasons.

Firstly, residents with a high level of education will promote their roles in some typical local locations such as museums and theatres. Second, educated residents can facilitate the density and variety of consumer services such as restaurants, cafes, and bars that consumers desire (Waldfogel, 2008 ). It is a fact that people with higher education also have more opportunities for political activities (Milligan et al., 2004 ) and can elect better government officials and help build clean cities with low pollution and crime. In addition, Lochner ( 2004 ) emphasized the role of education as an investment in human capital, increasing future legal employment opportunities and deterring participation in crime. If human capital adds more marginal return to work than crime, then human capital investment and schooling should reduce crime. Therefore, strategies to improve schooling (or schooling efficiency) should reduce most types of street crime and are more likely to be more tolerant of others than themselves (Florida, 2002 ). However, certain types of white collar crime (e.g. embezzlement, fraud) may increase with education if they sufficiently reward skills learned in school (Hjalmarsson & Lochner, 2012 ). Also, when discussing the issue of education level and crime, in a study by Ehrlich ( 1975 ), the author found that it is not necessary to imply that education reduces crime. Because, First, unobserved personal traits such as patience or risk aversion may directly influence schooling and criminal decisions. Individuals who choose more education (even after conditioning on observable characteristics) are likely to choose less crime, regardless of their education level, in which case regression-based estimates cannot determine causality. Second, exploiting differences in crime and education between states or local communities can also lead to biased estimates. Governments can choose between funding the police force or quality public schools, which often creates a false positive correlation between education and crime. Alternatively, unobserved community characteristics may directly affect the costs or benefits of education and crime. Third, reverse causality is another important issue. Individuals who plan to be heavily involved in crime (for example, because they are particularly good at crime, enjoy crime, or live in areas with many illegal opportunities) may choose to drop out of school at a young age (Lochner, 2004 ). Arrests or detentions related to juvenile delinquency may also cause some young people to drop out of school (Hjalmarsson, 2008 ). Under certain circumstances, for those who do not have the opportunity to access education to generate wages, committing crimes seems to be a reluctant way of survival. Therefore, providing disadvantaged urban youth with better schools can substantially reduce juvenile and adult crime, even if it has little effect on traditional education outcomes (Cullen et al, 2006 ).

In addition, higher education is a “measure” of social distance between quintiles. Some authors (Moretti, 2004 ) analyze the benefits of investing in higher education, while other authors (Ferrante, 2009 ) analyze the link between education and life satisfaction. Education has an effect on income (Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, 2004 ); (Gregorio & Lee, 2002 ), and higher education leads to higher incomes, and education is the most powerful tool to reduce income inequality (Stephens, Markus, & Fryberg, 2012 ); (Abdullah, Doucouliagos, & Manning, 2015 ); (Stephens, Markus, & Fryberg, 2012 ). Thus, there is a significant link between education and inequality (Marshall & Fukao, 2019 ). Through the universalization of higher education, each country strives to promote quality of life and social justice, minimizing socio-cultural differences (Kothari, 1996 ). At the same time, quality education leads to happiness (Samali, 2010 ) because education has a positive role in increasing quality of life (Bauer, et al., 2018 ). However, it must be understood that individuals with more education do not earn more just because of the diploma they have but because of the quality of the work they are doing. Because of the quality of their work, they earn more (Gillies, 2011 ). Undeniably, much evidence attests to higher education graduates' continual ‘employment opportunities’ (Schomburg & Teichler, 2006 ).

This paper presents an accurate and specific document approach to research through the Vos viewer tool. However, it would be remiss if this study did not address its limitations. The first refers to the selection of the analyzed scientific knowledge database. From this point of view, this is limited, using only the WOS database. However, other databases may contain relevant literature in the field, which may yield additional information (Cicea & Marinescu, 2021 ).

In addition, the author presents the role of higher education in the creation of human resources and considers higher education as insurance for job search; Higher education also plays an important role in green growth and addressing social inequality, especially among income groups.

In addition, in this study, the author only presents slices of the role of higher education in the development of a country, so the study does not go into specific aspects. However, a new research direction will be explored in the future when an issue is approached in this study: cost sharing. A current issue in many countries is university autonomy. This trend is considered inevitable in global education, a "revolution" to fundamentally and comprehensively renovate higher education. However, when the university is autonomous, many schools simultaneously increase tuition fees, causing society to fear that it will increase the pressure on study costs on the shoulders of learners. This predicament results from the management level and the educational institution's confused ideas, which conflate university autonomy with self-sufficiency in resources; these are two distinct issues. University autonomy does not mean that universities have to be self-sufficient regarding resources and funding. The primary funding source for public schools is from the state budget. Therefore, the State should not cut the budget of autonomous universities, but on the contrary, should increase budget support for schools that successfully implement the policy of university autonomy; considering them as worthy places to focus on investing to quickly improve the quality of training, helping the schools soon become essential national schools. When it comes to increasing tuition fees, regardless of the country, public schools have a principle that tuition fees must be fair, creating learning opportunities for everyone. Therefore, the tuition fee is usually limited, not increasing indefinitely, but should be based on the average income of the people (Newsnpr, 2022 ). Besides, when the labor market is increasingly expanding, human capital flight from one country to another is becoming a trend. Therefore, it is required that higher education make breakthroughs in reforming training forms to meet competitiveness and adapt to particular circumstances. Especially when the whole world has just passed through the COVID -19 pandemic with many changes from awareness to action. Thus, this study contributes both in terms of literature as well as a premise to delve into specific aspects of higher education and the development of a country.

To promote the role of higher education further in the future, the author proposes some recommendations:

First, universities need to strengthen cooperation, coordinate and share ideas on scientific research; propose to state management agencies appropriate policies to support, encourage and promote green growth; promote cooperation in research, development, testing, and technology transfer for green growth. Because each university has its strengths, linking universities in the process of research, development, testing, and technology transfer will contribute to enhancing the role and position of universities in the process of participating in green growth; strengthen the exchange of lecturers, researchers, and students in the field of green technology, which should be focused on areas with great potential such as energy or environmental technology. At the same time, strengthen the research, teaching, training, and learning capacity of lecturers, researchers, and students, contributing to training high-quality human resources for green growth.

Second, connect training with practice: Enterprise semester, jointly build and evaluate training programs, invite experts from enterprises to teach. Enterprise recruiting personnel is the output of the university; together with career counseling; The university supports personnel training for businesses.

Third, internationalize the university's teaching staff and curricula to meet the competitiveness of countries with strengths in higher education.

Fourth, connect brand communication and sharing messages and images: communicate corporate brands in academic spaces of the university, on university communication channels; organize events and spread the brand to the university's learners.

Fifth, connect and share social responsibility: fund facilities; academic grants; sponsor student activities; fund technology development

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Trinh, N.T.H. Higher Education and Its Role for National Development. A Research Agenda with Bibliometric Analysis. Interchange 54 , 125–143 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-023-09493-9

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Research in Context: Treating depression

Finding better approaches.

While effective treatments for major depression are available, there is still room for improvement. This special Research in Context feature explores the development of more effective ways to treat depression, including personalized treatment approaches and both old and new drugs.

Woman standing on a road between a bleak, desolate area and a lush, green area.

Everyone has a bad day sometimes. People experience various types of stress in the course of everyday life. These stressors can cause sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, frustration, or guilt. You may not enjoy the activities you usually do. These feelings tend to be only temporary. Once circumstances change, and the source of stress goes away, your mood usually improves. But sometimes, these feelings don’t go away. When these feelings stick around for at least two weeks and interfere with your daily activities, it’s called major depression, or clinical depression.

In 2021, 8.3% of U.S. adults experienced major depression. That’s about 21 million people. Among adolescents, the prevalence was much greater—more than 20%. Major depression can bring decreased energy, difficulty thinking straight, sleep problems, loss of appetite, and even physical pain. People with major depression may become unable to meet their responsibilities at work or home. Depression can also lead people to use alcohol or drugs or engage in high-risk activities. In the most extreme cases, depression can drive people to self-harm or even suicide.

The good news is that effective treatments are available. But current treatments have limitations. That’s why NIH-funded researchers have been working to develop more effective ways to treat depression. These include finding ways to predict whether certain treatments will help a given patient. They're also trying to develop more effective drugs or, in some cases, find new uses for existing drugs.

Finding the right treatments

The most common treatments for depression include psychotherapy, medications, or a combination. Mild depression may be treated with psychotherapy. Moderate to severe depression often requires the addition of medication.

Several types of psychotherapy have been shown to help relieve depression symptoms. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy helps people to recognize harmful ways of thinking and teaches them how to change these. Some researchers are working to develop new therapies to enhance people’s positive emotions. But good psychotherapy can be hard to access due to the cost, scheduling difficulties, or lack of available providers. The recent growth of telehealth services for mental health has improved access in some cases.

There are many antidepressant drugs on the market. Different drugs will work best on different patients. But it can be challenging to predict which drugs will work for a given patient. And it can take anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks to know whether a drug is working. Finding an effective drug can involve a long period of trial and error, with no guarantee of results.

If depression doesn’t improve with psychotherapy or medications, brain stimulation therapies could be used. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, uses electrodes to send electric current into the brain. A newer technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), stimulates the brain using magnetic fields. These treatments must be administered by specially trained health professionals.

“A lot of patients, they kind of muddle along, treatment after treatment, with little idea whether something’s going to work,” says psychiatric researcher Dr. Amit Etkin.

One reason it’s difficult to know which antidepressant medications will work is that there are likely different biological mechanisms that can cause depression. Two people with similar symptoms may both be diagnosed with depression, but the causes of their symptoms could be different. As NIH depression researcher Dr. Carlos Zarate explains, “we believe that there’s not one depression, but hundreds of depressions.”

Depression may be due to many factors. Genetics can put certain people at risk for depression. Stressful situations, physical health conditions, and medications may contribute. And depression can also be part of a more complicated mental disorder, such as bipolar disorder. All of these can affect which treatment would be best to use.

Etkin has been developing methods to distinguish patients with different types of depression based on measurable biological features, or biomarkers. The idea is that different types of patients would respond differently to various treatments. Etkin calls this approach “precision psychiatry.”

One such type of biomarker is electrical activity in the brain. A technique called electroencephalography, or EEG, measures electrical activity using electrodes placed on the scalp. When Etkin was at Stanford University, he led a research team that developed a machine-learning algorithm to predict treatment response based on EEG signals. The team applied the algorithm to data from a clinical trial of the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft) involving more than 300 people.

Young woman undergoing electroencephalography.

EEG data for the participants were collected at the outset. Participants were then randomly assigned to take either sertraline or an inactive placebo for eight weeks. The team found a specific set of signals that predicted the participants’ responses to sertraline. The same neural “signature” also predicted which patients with depression responded to medication in a separate group.

Etkin’s team also examined this neural signature in a set of patients who were treated with TMS and psychotherapy. People who were predicted to respond less to sertraline had a greater response to the TMS/psychotherapy combination.

Etkin continues to develop methods for personalized depression treatment through his company, Alto Neuroscience. He notes that EEG has the advantage of being low-cost and accessible; data can even be collected in a patient’s home. That’s important for being able to get personalized treatments to the large number of people they could help. He’s also working on developing antidepressant drugs targeted to specific EEG profiles. Candidate drugs are in clinical trials now.

“It’s not like a pie-in-the-sky future thing, 20-30 years from now,” Etkin explains. “This is something that could be in people's hands within the next five years.”

New tricks for old drugs

While some researchers focus on matching patients with their optimal treatments, others aim to find treatments that can work for many different patients. It turns out that some drugs we’ve known about for decades might be very effective antidepressants, but we didn’t recognize their antidepressant properties until recently.

One such drug is ketamine. Ketamine has been used as an anesthetic for more than 50 years. Around the turn of this century, researchers started to discover its potential as an antidepressant. Zarate and others have found that, unlike traditional antidepressants that can take weeks to take effect, ketamine can improve depression in as little as one day. And a single dose can have an effect for a week or more. In 2019, the FDA approved a form of ketamine for treating depression that is resistant to other treatments.

But ketamine has drawbacks of its own. It’s a dissociative drug, meaning that it can make people feel disconnected from their body and environment. It also has the potential for addiction and misuse. For these reasons, it’s a controlled substance and can only be administered in a doctor’s office or clinic.

Another class of drugs being studied as possible antidepressants are psychedelics. These include lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. These drugs can temporarily alter a person’s mood, thoughts, and perceptions of reality. Some have historically been used for religious rituals, but they are also used recreationally.

In clinical studies, psychedelics are typically administered in combination with psychotherapy. This includes several preparatory sessions with a therapist in the weeks before getting the drug, and several sessions in the weeks following to help people process their experiences. The drugs are administered in a controlled setting.

Dr. Stephen Ross, co-director of the New York University Langone Health Center for Psychedelic Medicine, describes a typical session: “It takes place in a living room-like setting. The person is prepared, and they state their intention. They take the drug, they lie supine, they put on eye shades and preselected music, and two therapists monitor them.” Sessions last for as long as the acute effects of the drug last, which is typically several hours. This is a healthcare-intensive intervention given the time and personnel needed.

In 2016, Ross led a clinical trial examining whether psilocybin-assisted therapy could reduce depression and anxiety in people with cancer. According to Ross, as many as 40% of people with cancer have clinically significant anxiety and depression. The study showed that a single psilocybin session led to substantial reductions in anxiety and depression compared with a placebo. These reductions were evident as soon as one day after psilocybin administration. Six months later, 60-80% of participants still had reduced depression and anxiety.

Psychedelic drugs frequently trigger mystical experiences in the people who take them. “People can feel a sense…that their consciousness is part of a greater consciousness or that all energy is one,” Ross explains. “People can have an experience that for them feels more ‘real’ than regular reality. They can feel transported to a different dimension of reality.”

About three out of four participants in Ross’s study said it was among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. And the degree of mystical experience correlated with the drug’s therapeutic effect. A long-term follow-up study found that the effects of the treatment continued more than four years later.

If these results seem too good to be true, Ross is quick to point out that it was a small study, with only 29 participants, although similar studies from other groups have yielded similar results. Psychedelics haven’t yet been shown to be effective in a large, controlled clinical trial. Ross is now conducting a trial with 200 people to see if the results of his earlier study pan out in this larger group. For now, though, psychedelics remain experimental drugs—approved for testing, but not for routine medical use.

Unlike ketamine, psychedelics aren’t considered addictive. But they, too, carry risks, which certain conditions may increase. Psychedelics can cause cardiovascular complications. They can cause psychosis in people who are predisposed to it. In uncontrolled settings, they have the risk of causing anxiety, confusion, and paranoia—a so-called “bad trip”—that can lead the person taking the drug to harm themself or others. This is why psychedelic-assisted therapy takes place in such tightly controlled settings. That increases the cost and complexity of the therapy, which may prevent many people from having access to it.

Better, safer drugs

Despite the promise of ketamine or psychedelics, their drawbacks have led some researchers to look for drugs that work like them but with fewer side effects.

Depression is thought to be caused by the loss of connections between nerve cells, or neurons, in certain regions of the brain. Ketamine and psychedelics both promote the brain’s ability to repair these connections, a quality called plasticity. If we could understand how these drugs encourage plasticity, we might be able to design drugs that can do so without the side effects.

Dr. David Olson at the University of California, Davis studies how psychedelics work at the cellular and molecular levels. The drugs appear to promote plasticity by binding to a receptor in cells called the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor (5-HT2AR). But many other compounds also bind 5-HT2AR without promoting plasticity. In a recent NIH-funded study, Olson showed that 5-HT2AR can be found both inside and on the surface of the cell. Only compounds that bound to the receptor inside the cells promoted plasticity. This suggests that a drug has to be able to get into the cell to promote plasticity.

Moreover, not all drugs that bind 5-HT2AR have psychedelic effects. Olson’s team has developed a molecular sensor, called psychLight, that can identify which compounds that bind 5-HT2AR have psychedelic effects. Using psychLight, they identified compounds that are not psychedelic but still have rapid and long-lasting antidepressant effects in animal models. He’s founded a company, Delix Therapeutics, to further develop drugs that promote plasticity.

Meanwhile, Zarate and his colleagues have been investigating a compound related to ketamine called hydroxynorketamine (HNK). Ketamine is converted to HNK in the body, and this process appears to be required for ketamine’s antidepressant effects. Administering HNK directly produced antidepressant-like effects in mice. At the same time, it did not cause the dissociative side effects and addiction caused by ketamine. Zarate’s team has already completed phase I trials of HNK in people showing that it’s safe. Phase II trials to find out whether it’s effective are scheduled to begin soon.

“What [ketamine and psychedelics] are doing for the field is they’re helping us realize that it is possible to move toward a repair model versus a symptom mitigation model,” Olson says. Unlike existing antidepressants, which just relieve the symptoms of depression, these drugs appear to fix the underlying causes. That’s likely why they work faster and produce longer-lasting effects. This research is bringing us closer to having safer antidepressants that only need to be taken once in a while, instead of every day.

—by Brian Doctrow, Ph.D.

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PDF INTRODUCTION: WHY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH MATTERS
Research is also important to ensure that development programmes are appropriate to the needs they aim to address. In addition to carrying out research themselves, development organizations should encourage the greater use of existing research. Especially in emergency situations, there is often a failure to seek out relevant research -
PDF National Development Delivers: And How! And How?
Hownational development delivers on wellbeing varies, in three ways. One, economic growth is much more important for achieving wellbeing at low versus high levels of income. Two, economic growth matters more for "basic needs" than for other dimensions of wellbeing (like social inclusiveness or environmental quality).
The three pointers of research and development (R&D) for growth
As Fischer and Newell (2008) argued, the development of research into benign innovation output is indeed the principal means for dealing with climate change. Therefore, huge financial commitments to R&D to provide clean technologies that are able to address challenges in hard-to-decarbonise sectors is ever more important.
Higher education contributing to local, national, and global ...
Higher education offers the potential to support glonacal (global, national, and local) development. This study presents new empirical and conceptual insights into the ways in which higher education can help to achieve and exceed the outcomes enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Open-ended online surveys were used to learn how academics in Georgia and Kazakhstan view the ...
Role and Nature of Research in Development
Namanji S.1, Ssekyewa C. 1, ∗. Antwerp University, Belgium. Centre for Ecosystems Research [∗Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]] Abstract. Research and development are two but inseparable aspects that have to be taken into consideration for any country ́s development agenda to be successful.
The Importance of Research in Developing Countries
The Importance of Research in Developing Countries is a scholarly article that examines the challenges and opportunities of conducting research in low and middle income countries. The article discusses the role of research in addressing global health, social and economic issues, and the need for collaboration, capacity building and ethical standards. The article also provides examples of ...
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Chapter 15, "The Impact of Sound Infrastructure on National Development", describes infrastructure as the back bone of all countries and emphasizes its importance to economic development. Part 6, titled "The Private Sector and Financial Markets", contains eight chapters and discusses how a country's natural resources must be ...
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This naïve "linear theory" or "cradle-to-grave" approach to science and development served as the blueprint for the establishment of the National Science Foundation in the United States and was widely copied throughout the world.2 But that model fails to stress the interaction that should occur among the phases. As one moves from pure ...
Psychology and National Development
Psychologists have important contributions to make to the debate on national development, particularly because human development is now viewed as central to national development. A major shortcoming of the psychological literature on national development is the lack of an adequate explanation of change. We address this gap through an account of ...
Educational Research for Regional and National Development
Since the 1960s scholars have spent much time exploring the relationship between education and educational research, on the one hand, and several aspects of national development, whether economic, social, cultural or political, on the other. Studies have pointed out...
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Importance of Research. A substantial and vital contribution to New Zealand's research effort is made by tertiary providers and the role they play is crucial role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. The Labour Party's 1999 tertiary education manifesto, 'Nation Building: Tertiary Education and the Knowledge Society', was a vision ...
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Investment in R&D is essential for a country's success in the global economy and for its ability to address challenges and opportunities in diverse societal areas such as health, environment, and national security. This report analyzes trends in U.S. R&D performance and funding, both domestically and within a global context. The growth of U.S. total R&D has accelerated in the most recent ...
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Much empirical and theoretical work emphasizes that research and development (R&D) is an important contributor to economic growth. R&D spending is likely to lead to growth through its positive effect on innovation and total factor productivity (TFP) (Romer, 1990; Lucas, 1988). As Grossman and Helpman (1994) note, improvements in technology through
Journal of Research in National Development
The Journal of Research in National Development aims to encourage interdisciplinary research, joint authorships and the recognition of the interface among disciplines. Favorite articles are quantitative, empirical and developmentally biased. It aims to serve all with interest in the development of developing countries, especially social scientists.
(PDF) Importance of Research in Development of Nation
IJARESM Publication, India >>>> www.ijaresm.com. Page 3215. Importance of research in the development of the nation. Amita Singh 1, Dr. Syed Hasan Qasim 2, Shanker Suwan Singh 3. 1 Research ...
PDF A GUIDE TO RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
The Guide walks the reader through the three stages of research strategy development: inform, create, and implement. 5.1.1 Inform. When creating a research strategy, there are three different stages. First, it is important to begin by collecting information to inform the research approach and strategy.
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The Role of Research and Development
The Role of Social Research in Development Programs ...
The discussion throws light on the crucial role played by social research in the process starting with identification of needs to facilitate designing of programme interventions, monitoring the progress during the course of implementation, evaluation at the end of the specific interventions etc. Download to read the full chapter text.
Localizing the economic impact of research and development
Summary. Coming out of World War II the United States was the first country to make research and development a national priority. At the time the federal government accounted for over 50 percent ...
PDF Why research is important
development of new techniques has been the opening up of new client groups, and areas for the application of counselling and psy-chotherapy. The relevance and effectiveness of existing models in these new contexts is an important topic for research. 5 Personal and professional development. One of the chief sources of
The Importance of Research and Development (R&D) for U.S
I believe it is critically important that we give greater priority to new and better research and development (R&D) investments, to help ensure our country's future competitiveness and to pave ...
PDF The Role of Education on National Development
According to National Policy on Education (2014), education is an instrument par excellence for effecting national development. Therefore, education is the instrument used for the development of human beings in the cognitive, affective, psychomotor and psycho productive domains. Education can be seen as the creation of sound mind in a sound body.
Higher Education and Its Role for National Development. A Research
The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the literature on the function of higher education and extract significant insights using the VosViewer and Citespaces tools. The findings reveal that higher education is a substantial worry for scientists, particularly in 2015-2019. Furthermore, research indicates a significant body of knowledge on the function of higher education in national ...
What Is Development?
Ultimately, defining international development is important because it can shape development outcomes. How countries categorize one another can affect how funding flows between them. Some $24 billion was spent on international development in 2022 by large donor entities (those participating in the OECD's Development Assistance Committee ...
Research in Context: Treating depression
This special Research in Context feature explores the development of more effective ways to treat depression, including personalized treatment approaches and both old and new drugs. ... That's important for being able to get personalized treatments to the large number of people they could help. He's also working on developing antidepressant ...
NASP 2025 Call For Presentation Proposals
Submissions. Submissions include a summary (maximum of 800 words) identifying the purpose, content, and expected outcomes for participants; and description (maximum of 30 words) stating the objectives of the presentation to be published in the convention program upon acceptance.See the online instructions for important information on these two proposal elements.

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