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(SEOUL=Yonhap News) South Korea had the highest ratio of research and development budget to gross domestic product (GDP) among the world's advanced nations in 2015, a report showed Thursday.

According to the report by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, the country's R&D intensity, or R&D expenditures as a percentage of its GDP, came to 4.23 percent, the highest among member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The country's R&D spending marked the sixth-highest worldwide last year, rising 3.5 percent from a year earlier, the report said.

The government, research institutes, universities and corporations spent a combined 65.9 trillion won (US$56.9) on R&D activity in 2015, it said.

The country's private sector spent a combined 49.1 trillion won on R&D activities last year, accounting for 74.6 percent of the total, while the comparable figure for the public segment was 16.2 trillion won, or 24.7 percent, according to the report. The remainder came from foreign countries.

The report also said the country had a total of 453,262 researchers last year, up 3.6 percent from a year earlier. The number is far above that of other OECD nations, such as Japan and France.

The report was based on an OECD guideline comprising 56,109 institutes across the country, the ministry said. The currency rate was 1,131.16 won to the dollar.

khj@yna.co.kr

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Source: Yonhap News (Dec. 8, 2016)