Scientific Competition between Countries: Did China Get What It Paid for?

Summary This paper examines the rise of China's relative standing in the global academic science marketplace. We first develop a simple theoretical model, based on the aggregation of individual knowledge production functions. This model predicts the existence of a stable power (scaling) law, relating the world share of countries' scientific production to their world share of public investment in scientific research. We test and confirm this prediction, using bibliometric crosscountry longitudinal data for OECD and non-OECD countries, over the 1996-2015 period. This analysis allows for China's impressive catch-up, and for the West's decline to be accounted for, in the science marketplace, over the last two decades.