chemical knowledge and wealth have been considered linked

Compared with indexes that reflect their financial, social, economic, or technological maturity, the scientific productivity of middle-income countries is more closely related to current and future wealth. We determined the contribution of the relative productivity of different scientific disciplines to predicting the future economic growth of a country. The results show that there are differences in the relative proportions of scientific output between rich and poor countries in different disciplines: In the next five years, countries with relatively high productivity in basic science fields such as physics and chemistry will be compared with those in medical and pharmaceutical applications. Compared with countries with higher relative productivity in the scientific field, the economic growth rate is the highest. The results show that middle-income countries that focus their academic efforts on selected areas of applied knowledge have slower economic growth than countries that invest in general basic science.

Chemical knowledge and wealth have been considered linked since ancient times. Napoleon once said: "Without great mathematics, there can be no great country." However, how this relationship works in the modern world is still a sensitive political issue. For example, there is no doubt that scientific and technological research affects economic development. Scientific development is closely linked to the prosperity of the country. The development of science is related to the tolerance and openness of society, reflecting the fact that the attitude to support science is related to the value of empirical facts, not personal beliefs. This is the basis of modern scientific progress. This statistical analysis of the correlation between scientific productivity and economic development found that the growth of economic development precedes the growth of scientific development, which shows that the role of science is to allow the long-term sustainable development of the economy, rather than triggering the long-term sustainable development of the economy.

Recently, Hidalgo and others have made important contributions to this debate. They proposed a new economic complexity index (ECI) to explain the knowledge that generates wealth in society. In their words, "Modern societies can accumulate a large amount of productive knowledge because they distribute fragmentary knowledge to many members." But to use it, this knowledge must be recombined through the organization and the market. Therefore, personal specialization generates diversity at the national and global levels. Our most prosperous modern societies are smarter, not because their citizens are personally smart, but because these societies have diverse technologies and because they can recombine these technologies to create more smarter and better products. "This ECI reflects the composition of a country's production output and the emergence of its structure, holding and combining knowledge.

These results raise new questions. Can certain fields of science promote economic development better than others? Is applied science more effective than basic science in promoting economic development?

method

There are no external sources of funding for our research.

In order to answer these questions, we first assessed the closeness of various widely used knowledge and socio-economic development indexes to classic national wealth indexes (such as per capita GDP). This is done using the connection tree cluster analysis from Statistica 7 software, using Euclidean distance to compare the weighted pair averages, and calculating a matrix from this distance. Then draw the tree from the data in the matrix.

Then, we compared each country's relative publication efforts in research in different fields of knowledge, and its current and future national wealth. Beginning in 1998, the number of publications in each country and region came from the Scopus database edited by SCimago, while the data for 1982 and 1992 were manually edited from Web of Science. We calculate the relative research effort of each scientific subject area, that is, the percentage of the country’s total number of papers published in journals in that field in that year. For example, by dividing the number of publications in the country's mathematics journals by the total number of publications in all disciplines in the country, and multiplying by 100, you can estimate the country's relative research work in mathematics. This number is used to calculate the "explicit comparative advantage" (RCA) of scientific publication efforts, adapted from the economics literature. RCA is the ratio of two shares. The numerator is the share of a country's publications in a certain discipline or scientific field in its total number of publications. The denominator is the ratio of the number of world publications in the same discipline to the total number of world publications.