Government research funding and research productivity in India

• In Event: The Role of Curricula in Shaping Student Outcomes

Proposal

Governments spend considerable sums of money to fund scientific research. India’s investment into research and development (R&D) grew from 0.628% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 1996 to 0.831% of GDP in 2011. The Indian government has indicated that it aims to increase India’s R&D expenditure to 2% of the GDP to spur innovation and economic development. However, there is little evidence documenting the effectiveness of government’s R&D expenditure in increasing research productivity in India. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between government research funding and research productivity at science and engineering colleges in India. Research productivity is defined to include the quantity of research in terms of total academic publications such as journal articles, books, conference proceedings etc., as well as the quality of research in terms of its citation count. The study will also focus on the impact heterogeneity of government research funding given various institution-level characteristics such as research curriculum and focus, faculty size, experience, and expertise, faculty hiring and promotion policies etc. This paper use institutional-level panel data on research funding and research productivity for regression analysis.

Author

• Akshay Jain, Stanford University