Description:
This data set contains aggregated data from 2001/02 to 2020/12 on R&D expenditure by province, type of R&D, research fields, socioeconomic objectives, sources of funds and personnel data. The data is recorded for each of the following economic sectors of the South African economy: Business, Government, Higher Education, Not-for-Profit Organisations and Science Councils.
Abstract:
The R&D Survey is aggregated time series data collected from 2001/02 to 2020/21 on five primary survey sectors:
Business sector, made up of companies, business associations and state-owned enterprises
Government sector, made up of national and provincial departments, research institutes and museums.
Higher Education Institutions sector, made up of universities, universities of technology and private higher education institutions. Some limited supplementary data from HEMIS was used in this sector.
Not-for-Profit Organisations (NPO) sector, made up of non-governmental and not-for-profit entities registered as Section 21 companies
Science Councils sector, made up of the nine science councils established through acts of parliament
Science Councils sector, made up of the nine science councils established through acts of parliament.
Some general organisational information was collected. The survey however focused on human resources and financial data relating to in-house R&D conducted on the national territory of South Africa.
In-house R&D personnel categories included:
Researchers
Technicians directly supporting R&D
Other personnel directly supporting R&D
Qualifications, gender and race
Full-time-equivalents (FTE) on R&D
In-house R&D expenditure categories included:
Capital expenditure, labour costs and other current expenditures.
Type of R&D (basic research, strategic basic research, applied research, and experimental development)
Provincial location
Sources of funds
Research fields (fields of science)
Socio-economic objective
National priority areas of interest
Multidisciplinary R&D
The key users of the data and findings include government departments, especially DSI and the OECD which use survey indicators in their annual time-series publication on Main Science and Technology Indicators (MSTI).
Ad hoc requests for data are also accommodated and inform academic papers, reports and other outputs.
Email survey
Face-to-face interview
Postal survey
Telephone interview
Web-based self-completion
The universe included consisted of:
Business enterprises (BUS): The business sector of large, medium and small enterprises, including state-owned companies.
Government (GOV): All government departments with an R&D component, government research institutes and museums.
Higher education institutions (HEI): Higher education institutions, namely the 21 universities (and academic hospitals) and 15 Universities of Technology.
Not-for-profit (NPO): Non-governmental and other organisations formally registered as not-for-profit institutions.
Science councils (SCI): The 8 science councils, including the Africa Institute of South Africa, as established through their individual Acts of Parliament.
The sampling method of each sector is briefly outlined below:
Business Sector: a purposive sampling procedure was employed whereby all known and likely R&D performers were targeted.
Government Sector: was surveyed using a census approach. All national and provincial government departments, research institutions and museums performing R&D were included.
Higher Education Sector: institutions, namely universities and Universities of Technology were included through a census survey.
Not-for-Profit Organisations (NPO) Sector: a purposive sampling procedure was employed whereby all known and likely R&D performers were targeted.
Science Councils Sector: was surveyed using a census approach.
