Expenditure on R&D rescales national patent distributions.

<p>Just as the total biomass of an ecosystem can be used to rescale the distribution for the frequency of organisms with a particular body mass in some area, total expenditure on R&D in a country can be used to rescale the distribution for the frequency of applicants in a country who have filed a particular number of patents. The left-hand plot shows the unscaled data, with each country indicated by a different color/shape of symbol. The right-hand plot shows the same data after the frequencies are scaled by business expenditure on R&D (millions of US dollars). The role played by GERD (gross expenditure on R&D) is similar. The one country for which the distribution does not match the others after rescaling (pink triangles) is China; a country which has only a recent record of filing patents at the EPO.