Feasibility Study for a United Nations Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries

Science today is a global enterprise involving some 7 million researchers drawing upon a worldwide research and development (R&D) spending of over US$1,000 billion and publishing their findings in some 25,000 specialized journals per year. Significantly, increased investments in R&D by more-advanced developing nations have enabled several of them to scale the heights historically held by the global science, technology and innovation (STI) triumvirate of Japan, North America, and Europe – with outsized returns in terms of their economic performance. Emblematically, those developing countries which constitute the so-called emerging markets are the same ones identified by the Royal Society as “new emergent scientific nations.