The Numbers Makers: Fifty Years of Science and Technology Official Statistics

Abstract

Official science and technology statistics arefifty years old. Among industrial countries,the forerunners were the United States, Canadaand Great Britain. This paper traces thedevelopment and the construction of S&Tstatistics in these three countries, and theirsubsequent standardization, mainly by theOECD, in the 1960s. It shows how military andscience policy needs drove the construction ofstatistics, until economic considerations cameto dominate their development. It alsodiscusses how statistics interacted withpolitics by way of studies that documentedgaps between OECD Member countries and betweenthe OECD and the USSR.