Measuring national “emerging technology” capabilities

How can national capabilities to develop emerg-ing technologies be measured? We use INSPEC and EI Compendex class codes to examine 33 countries ’ research and development activity. We select candidate emerging technologies based on the Rand Corporation’s categories. We screen these to tally those that show strong recent, and increasing, R&D publication rates. The resulting measures show strong convergence; indeed, their lack of divergence is unsettling. Our measures suggest that China now stands forth as an ‘emerging technology ’ research power compara-ble to Germany, the UK, and France. A number of other nations evidence a striking lack of R&D activity, posing questions about their longer-range high-tech competitiveness