Earlier this weeek, SCDigest published a story on a new index from The Economist magazine that measures how ready 25 top countries are for the new era of robots and artificial intelligence. (See What Countries are Most Ready for Robots and AI?)

The index looked at such factors as three main categories: innovation environment, education policies, and labor market policies.

As part of the report, relative to the innovation dimension, was a chart on what percent of their GDP different countries spend on R&D.

As can be seen below, South Korea by far tops the lists based on 2016 numbers, the latest data available from UN estimates, at 4.23%.

That is far above number 2 Japan, at 3.28%, which in turn is well ahead of number 3 Germany (2.88%, number 4 the US (2.79%, and number 5 France (2.23%.). South Korea, by the way, also topped the overall readiness index.

China interestingly was at number 8, at 2.07%. Then again if you force companies to turn over intellectual property for doing businessn in your country you can afford to spend less on research,

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