| Chapter 2: | Poverty and the Knowledge Economy |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In the call to produce locally relevant solutions to social problems, the idea of promoting scientific and technological research likely applies to other developing regions as well—not only to Africa.
A visual representation of the scientific research produced around the globe is shown in figure 2.2. The map employs data collected from the World Bank's 2005 World Development Indicators and was formulated based on the number of scientific papers published in 2001. The larger the country appears on the map, the more papers were produced in that region.
Simply stated, regions that are wealthier produced more scientific papers.2 The map reveals a locational bias: roughly three times more scientific papers per researcher are published in Western Europe, North America, and Japan than in any other region.
In 2008 the World Bank highlighted the importance of the knowledge economy by creating an interactive benchmarking system to show progress and make comparisons by country and region. This knowledge-assessment methodology (KAM), according to the World Bank's Web site,
Figure 2.2. Map of scientific publications in the world.
Source. Reproduced by permission from Science Research, Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).