Global trends in health research and development expenditures – the challenge of making reliable estimates for international comparison

Table 1 Changes in estimated health R&D spending between 2007 and 2012 for countries in Asia-Oceania, the USA and Canada, using two methods and two data sources (in billion US dollars)

Country	Data from Chakma et al. [4]		Data from Røttingen et al. [5]
Country	Current exchange rates and NIH 2012 prices	2012 PPP exchange rates and 2012 GDP prices	Current exchange rates and NIH 2012 prices	2012 PPP exchange rates and 2012 GDP prices
USA	−12.0	−4.0	– *
Canada	−0.7	−0.7	−1.0	−1.0
Asia-Oceania	20.9	19.2	17.0	15.0
Japan	9.0	2.8	7.3	2.4
China	6.4	8.7	4.3	5.6
South Korea	2.5	4.3	2.2	3.9
Australia	1.7	0.4	2.2	0.8
India	0.6	1.6	0.5	1.4
Other Asia-Pacific**	0.6	0.7	0.5	0.9

Column 1 is the original data from Chakma et al. [4]. In column 2, we have applied analytical approaches to their data that are currently considered best practice. In columns 3 and 4 we applied both their method and the best practice approaches to time series compiled on the same basis as the 2009 data in our own study, which draw on different data sources in some cases. [5].
*We were unable to estimate the growth in health related R&D expenditure in the United States on the same basis as we used in our article as the underlying figures for industry were only collected for 2008 and 2009 [11].
**Column 2 is recalculated from the data for Singapore and Taiwan in the pie-chart in the appendix of the article by Chakma et al. [4] combined with the growth rates in the text chart as the two countries are grouped in the text table used for the other countries.

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