My assigned title is so broad that it does not trouble my conscience to limit the topic. One limitation is geographic. I will deal only with five countries -- the United States, Japan, the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. They are countries I know a bit more about than others, but a more scholarly justification is that these five countries account for 85 percent of the R&D in the 21 OECD countries. Among these 21, the five also are the most R&D intensive as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures to GNP with the exception of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands
