R&D expenditures in the business enterprise sector, higher education sector and the government sector were 70.8 billion ISK in 2019, or 2.35% of GDP. This is the highest that these expenditures have been, as a percentage of GDP, since Statistics Iceland started measuring them in 2014. R&D expenditures were 56.9 billion ISK in 2018 (2.01%) while in 2016 they were 55.1 billion ISK (2.13%).
The average R&D expenditures, as a percentage of GDP, of the member states of the European Union increased from 2.11% to 2.14% between 2018 and 2019. Sweden had the highest percentage, going from 3.32% in 2018 to 3.39% in 2019. The second highest percentage was in Austria (3.19%) followed by Germany, with 3.17%. On a list with the EU members and Norway, Iceland was in seventh place.
The data collection covers the business enterprise sector, private non-profit sector, the higher education sector and the government sector. R&D expenditures in the business enterprise sector and the private non-profit sector were 48.7 billion ISK, while the expenditures were 19.9 billion ISK in the higher education sector and 2.3 billion ISK in the government sector.
About the data
Expenditures as percentage of GDP are subject to changes in official figures on GDP and R&D expenditures on previous years may also be updated following later data collections. The figures are released annually and collected each year from the higher education and government sector. However, data is only collected every other year from the business enterprise sector on the expenditures of the previous calendar year and estimates of the expenditures for the calendar year of the survey.