from less cropland. A large body of evidence closely links improved productivity to  investment in  agricultural re­search and development, averaging rates of return of over 40%, particularly for commodities with short production cycles (Byerlee et al., 2006). It is not surprising that in 2000, US$731 billion was invested in sciences worldwide, includ­ing public and private research. This represents less than 2% of the world's US$42.4 trillion gross domestic product for that year and an increase of nearly one-third over the inflation adjusted total of just five years earlier (Pardey et al., 2006).
     ESAP, excluding Australia and New Zealand, spent about US$142.4 billion or nearly 25% of total global expen­ditures on research and development, a spending increase of about US$52 billion from 1995 to 2000. This regional trend hid two extremely disturbing developments—a large and growing gap between industrial and developing countries

and the miniscule percentage of gross research and develop­ment spending for domestic AKST. The overall growth in ESAP masked that this investment was concentrated in only a handful of countries. China, India and Japan accounted for nearly 85% of the region's scientific spending in 1995, climbing to 87% by 2000. In contrast, research spending by most of the other 24 ESAP countries declined about 2%. Agricultural research and development expenditure in 2000 was a mere 5% of global science spending. Funding for AKST within ESAP, with the exception of six industrial countries, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, could be characterized as perennially dismal and declining, if not outright stagnant, with the public sec­tor shouldering the bulk, 92%, of the expenditures. Three typical major funding sources for public research and devel­opment were production or export taxes, direct government appropriations and external sources (Dar, 1995).

Country

2003 (of 61 countries)

2004 (of 61 countries)

2005 (of 61 countries)

2006 (of 61 countries)

Singapore

4

2

3

3

Japan

25

23

21

17

China

29

24

31

19

Malaysia

21

16

28

23

India

50

34

39

29

Thailand

30

29

27

32

Korea, Rep.

37

35

29

38

Philippines

49

52

49

49

Indonesia

57

58

59

60