ABSTRACT
During the last decades, all the industrialized countries have devoted increasing amounts of expenditure to the R&D activities. More than two per cent of the GNP of these countries is currently allocated to research activities, education and hi-tech formation. Nevertheless expenditure growth rates have not been the same among the seven different countries analyzed in this paper (Japan, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France and Italy). Japan became a technological leader, in so far as the GNP part devoted to the R&D activities reached the level of 3 percent in 1993. In the same decades we can observe the USA’s relative decline beginning from the second part of the eighties.
