ABSTRACT
Comparatively little is known about the organisation, strengths and weaknesses of industrial research and development in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Thus one reason for the large inter-German technology gap in “modern” branches such as plastics, electronics, data processing, and instrument building was presumably a substantially lower GDR research and development effort in these branches, in both absolute and relative terms. A rough estimate shows that in the GDR more than a third of the research and development - measured in terms of the number of employees - is concentrated in supra-enterprise establishments of the national economy. The chapter aims to evaluate such evidence as could be collected on the following aspects of the GDR’s industrial R&D effort: the distribution of manpower by type of establishment; facilities; the time spent on R&D; the employment and qualification structure of manpower; and the scale and direction of the R&D effort.
