A small rising star?

SCIENCE:Ireland has been described as a 'small rising star' in international technological standing. The same report shows, however, that competitiveness is sliding

It's nice to be described as a "small rising star". That's what we are: according to an assessment of Ireland's international technological standing. Details of our ranking on a number of ratings come from the latest High Tech Indicators report from the Georgia Institute of Technology. It has been calculating national technological standing in a basket of countries since 1993, and Ireland was included in the current list of 33 countries from 1999 because of the jump in our R&D investment from that time.

The latest report, released in late January, takes some study, however, if only to understand the categories that have been established to determine who outranks whom on a range of technology fronts.

It assesses five main indicators of a country's ability to perform in the tech area; four measures of inputs; and one output indicator. A country's "technological standing", for example, is an "output indicator" for "recent overall success in exporting high technology products".

The input indicators include "national orientation", which gauges the "direct action" to achieve technological competitiveness - in other words government willingness and interest in thie area; "socioeconomic infrastructure", which looks at the IT support systems in place; "technological infrastructure", which looks at the institutions and the availability of money to make things happen technologically; and "productive capacity", which looks at the physical and human resources available to support efficient manufacturing.

Each of these has its own formula and the rankings are achieved using hard statistics, the observations of "experts" if intangibles are involved, or a combination of the two.

How much weight you give the overall report depends on your trust in the quality of statistical data in these various categories, and also the impartiality of the expert commentators.

The Government would likely express satisfaction with the general results. Given that we are usually ranked in the top half of the gang of 33 countries and in one area we actually come out at number one.

This is for "national orientation" or willingness to take action in this field. Here we sit in first place; this victory built on a jump of 9.3 points from the last study to a level of 83.4 (out of a possible 100 points).

Some of the pleasure is snatched away by the report's comment that Ireland's new-found victory finally reverses a steady decline from our first listing in 1999. This leads to the observation: "So this may be largely noise in the indicator." Even so, a win is a win. Back of the net.

Our "socioeconomic infrastructure" performance puts us at ninth place overall, but our technological infrastructure lags, with a placement at just 18. For those of us working here, the ranking is hardly surprising. Yet it strangely leaves us ahead of Asian tiger economies such as Singapore and Malaysia, but well behind many of our EU partners.

The Georgia Tech authors take their four input indicators and average them in yet another metric of technological standing. The blend attempts to be a gauge of "potential future high-tech competitiveness".

Here, Ireland in a very comfortable 10th place, ahead of the rest of Europe except for Germany (third), the UK (fourth) and Sweden (sixth). The US heads the group, followed by Japan, and we sit directly behind the new technological powerhouse, China.

The result on technological standing is where the report describes us as "a small rising star", this kindness even though we managed to slip 6.3 points from our level in the previous report.

Of course, it's not all good news: it tempers the positive comments by cautioning about some countries heavy dependence on the export of electronics. The implication for Ireland is clear as that is one of our most attractive export categories.

"Interpretation of these results must take into account the nature of the indicator mix of statistical and expert opinion measures, huge differences in the scales of the county economies and so forth. For [technological standing] we should especially beware of the emphasis on electronics exports data," the report states.

It might not score points for clarity, nor is it immune to criticism for its assumptions and choice of indicators, but it does tell its own tale. What we need to be aware of, however is that the Georgia Tech team sum up with a delivery of a less than encouraging perspective of our future national competitiveness.

Comparing our current and future overall high-tech competitiveness 15 years from now it shows us falling back by almost 29 per cent.

The full report is available from: www.aimbe.org/assets/library/ 407_hti2007reportnsf012208.pdf