A comparison with China is also instructive: in the year 2000 the incidence of R&D on GDP was 0.1 percentage point lower than in Italy, at 0.9 per 2  cent; 18 years later it was almost a full percentage point higher, at 2.2 per cent (an even more impressive increase if we consider the striking growth of Chinese GDP). 9.
Although the problem concerns both the public and private sectors, the gap with developed countries is larger in the latter, where the share of R&D expenditure is 0.9 per cent, about half of the OECD average (1.7 per cent).