Poster #74 - A Genealogy of Strategic Technologies: Evidence from Government R&D Spending Across Administrations in South Korea

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

In response to national and global challenges such as economic slowdowns, geopolitical rivalry, climate disruption, and energy security, advanced countries have promoted “strategic” or “critical” technologies through large-scale public investments in research and development (R&D). Despite the long-term nature of such investment, however, it remains unclear to what extent the selection and promotion of strategic technologies are shaped by government changes. In this light, South Korea provides an intriguing case given its long-standing reliance on proactive government intervention in the economy and society. Since the introduction of national R&D programs in the early 1980s, it has been a very common practice that an incoming government creates its own portfolio of strategic technologies and promotes them with R&D funding.
This study aims to create a genealogy of strategic technologies in South Korea across the administrations of the last two decades by examining how the portfolio of strategic technologies has changed across administrations and tracing such changes through actual government R&D spending. We first develop an analytical framework for a consistent comparison of strategic technologies across administrations, as each administration defined strategic technologies with varying labels and levels. In particular, we construct a common grouping scheme of “key technologies” of each administration reflecting its policy priorities and link them to the National Science and Technology Standard Classification (NSTSC) that provides standardized disciplinary criteria. As such, our scheme reconciles the policy-oriented classification and statistical categorization of strategic technologies. With this framework, we map strategic technologies of each administration and identify the technological domains that are more vulnerable to, or insulated from, government changes. We then conduct an empirical analysis of the actual government R&D expenditure on the technological domains defined by the aforementioned framework, using the national dataset of government R&D projects from 2002 to 2024.
Our findings reveal systematic variations across technological domains in their responsiveness to government changes. While some areas such as energy technologies exhibit substantial volatility and funding shifts due to administrative transitions, others (particularly, biotechnology and healthcare) demonstrate strong continuity and stable funding, revealing insulation from political influence. In comparison, digital technologies show an evolutionary change, with earlier priorities such as ICT giving way to emerging areas like AI and big data. These patterns indicate that not all strategic technologies are equally sensitive to political change, and that the relationship between policy priorities and budget allocation varies by technological domain. This study provides some of the rare empirical evidence on how the selection of strategic technologies is shaped by political changes and the extent to which such shifts are reflected in public R&D investment. It also makes a theoretical contribution by offering a novel framework that enables a systematic comparison of policy priorities and R&D funding allocation.

Author

• Daeun LEE, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Presenting Author