...Part II Oil & Innovation

...i'm not an economist but read the figures with interest...19 of 57 OIC countries are blessed with rich natural resources...however, income from oil & gas is argued to have little direct impact on the development of local economies...oil-rich Arab countries are said to be spending their big money on imports from the West, investment overseas and military arms...which did not contribute to the building of a high growth entrepreneurial/innovation economy...for comparison, OIC countries (57 in total) spent only 1.8% of the World Total Gross Domestic Expenditures on R&D compared to EU (23.5%), US (33.5%) and Japan (13.4%)...the no. of researchers/scientists in OIC countries is also lowest with 649 researchers per million people compared to the world average (2532), EU (6494), Russia (5634), Korea (8700) and Japan (9061)...except Jordan and Tunisia, others are below the world average...and Malaysia (<1000)...of the 1.85 million patents filed worldwide in 2008, less than 1% are filed in the OIC countries...alhamdulillah Malaysia comes second after Turkey...similarly, the 63,000 'combined' no. of published articles in the scientific journals by OIC members in 2009 is much lower than individual countries like US, China, Germany, Japan and England...and 70% of those are published/dominated by only 5 countries like Turkey (1), Iran (2), Egypt (3), Malaysia (4) and Pakistan (5)...how about others?...for high-tech exports OIC contribute only 4.3% of world total compared to US (13.1%), EU (33.3%), China (19.3%), Korea (6.3%) and Japan (7.0%)...alhamdulillah Malaysia again is the biggest high-tech exporter 86.5% of OIC total (but need to remember that we are still depending on foreign companies like Intel investing in Malaysia to achieve that)...the figures reflect the lack of innovation among the OIC members...