An Investigation of the Performance of the Policy of Spending a Percentage of the Government Agencie's Funds on Research and Development

Today، possession of new technologies and creation of wealth by these technologies not only affect the economic indicators of the country at international level، but also cause to strengthen and enhance the national security، as well as the country’s regional and global influence. From this perspective، different countries compete with each other for more investment in research and technology development. R&D intensity index reflects the determination of the countries for investment in research and development. Surveying data regarding the investment of various countries in the field of science and technology reveals that more than 50 percent of the total world investments in research and development have been made by the four major economic powers in the world (America، China، Japan and Germany). Despite the emphasis of upstream documents to boost research and development spending share of GDP to about 3%، Iran’s investment in research and development has been less than 1 percent of GDP in recent years. Therefore، the policymakers obliged the government through the main clause of Article 16 of the Fifth Development Plan to set its plans in a way that the R&D spending share of GDP increases 5. 0 percent annually in order to increase investment in research and development. The government required the government agencies through the budget law of the years 2011، 2012 and 2013 to spend a percentage of their funds on research and technology development. The optimized implementation of the policy of assigning a portion of the government agencies funds to research and development is faced with challenges. These challenges could be further classified into two categories; challenges resulting from the ambiguities of the policy’s documents and the challenges resulting from implementing the policy.