{"id":211,"date":"2005-12-01T20:32:43","date_gmt":"2005-12-01T18:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/wordpress\/?p=211"},"modified":"2005-12-01T20:32:43","modified_gmt":"2005-12-01T18:32:43","slug":"swedish-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Swedish innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Scandanavian countries strike me as the most progressive in so many ways, with Sweden being particularly abundant and innovative. It didn&#8217;t get to be like that for no reason. Its government <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itsweden.com\/main.aspx?id=13&amp;type=features&amp;pageid=739\">spends 4.27% of its GDP on research<\/a>, more than any other country in the world besides Israel. Unlike Israel, and many other countries trailing Sweden, military research doesn&#8217;t feature very highly. Since Sweden also spends substantially on foreign aid, and its welfare system, it shows what can be done when you don&#8217;t blow money on arms deals, invasions or other nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>South Africa, having hopefully satisifed its desire for new destroyers and the attendant 4&#215;4&#8217;s has been quietly upping its percentage, and in 2003\/2004 it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hsrc.ac.za\/media\/2005\/4\/20050414_1.html\">stood at 0.81%<\/a>, up from 0.76% in 2001. Other countries figures include Finland (3.46%), the USA (2.60%), the European Union as a whole (2.26%), Russia (1.28%), China (1.22%) and Argentina (0.41%)  (I have to include at least one country that spends less than SA).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Scandanavian countries strike me as the most progressive in so many ways, with Sweden being particularly abundant and innovative. It didn&#8217;t get to be like that for no reason. Its government spends 4.27% of its GDP on research, more than any other country in the world besides Israel. Unlike Israel, and many other countries&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=211\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Swedish innovation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fire-social","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}