Little Money
The Ministry of Health & Welfare’s R&D budget for this year regarding infectious diseases is no more than 30.8 billion won (US$27.5 million), less than 1 percent of that of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the United States.
The stark contrast shows the hollowness of the Korean government’s slogan to grow the health sector as Korea’s future growth industry. Besides, its R&D investment in health and medical treatment in general represented only 7.1 percent of its total R&D budget in 2013, or 1.2 trillion won (US$1.1 billion) out of 16.9 trillion won (US$15.1 billion), and the ratio went down for years, although the absolute amount of investment increased.
According to the National Assembly Budget Office, a 1 trillion won (US$894 million) R&D investment in health and medical treatment raises the GDP by more than 3 trillion won (US$2.7 billion). Such a high effectiveness is why advanced countries are continuing to increase their R&D investments in this field. In the U.S., 22.5 percent (US$32.6 billion) of the total national R&D budget (US$144.4 billion) went to the sector last year, and only national defense took a larger amount of R&D budget. The percentages added up to 17.4 percent and 9.7 percent in the U.K. and the E.U., respectively.
In Korea, on the contrary, what little R&D budget is divided into a number of organizations such as the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, and Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning, which makes systematic and continuous investment impossible. An amount of 453.5 billion won (US$405.5 million) has been earmarked as this year’s R&D budget of the Ministry of Health & Welfare, which is just 2.6 percent of the total R&D budget of the government. Still, the ministry has to run more than 30 projects with little money.