THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATION OF ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY OF SCIENCE AT THE MACRO LEVEL

Abstract

The article is devoted to solving the problem of evaluating the effectiveness of research and development systems of countries with the help of economic indicators that could be useful for solving the tasks of improving scientific policy and management, in particular in Ukraine.
 It is noted that the main ones could be economic indicators of the effectiveness of research and development, which would represent the difference and the relationship between the sum of the prices of fragments of new knowledge and the cost of their creation. However, it is shown that the calculation of both of these components can hardly be accurate enough, due to the nature of knowledge formation and the peculiarities of their use.
 It is shown that the publications number in Ukraine, especially in the case of social and economic sciences, is improved contrary to the decrease of funding and reducing the number of researchers. The growth of a publications number in Scopus can be explained mostly by the norms of the state power documents, as regard to scientific reports, and the award of scientific degrees and the assignment of academic titles. It is proved that at the macro level bibliometric indicators of publications have grounds not to reflect changes in human scientific potential and research funding, and in fact they are not equivalent to either cognitive achievements or economic results.
 Indicators representing the direct ratio of industrial and business expenditures to total R&D expenditures, as well as a modification in which industrial and business expenditures are attributed to the sum of all other expenditures, are proposed. We think these indicators to some extent could represent the orientation of the research and development system of the country to meet the needs of the economy and technological development, its innovative orientation.
 The originality of the approach is that we either limit ourselves to indicators that have economic meaning, or use their ratios, avoiding the comparison and combination of incommensurable entities. We believe that in evaluating the results of research and development, it is advisable to operate with the concepts of fragments of knowledge based on the ideas of classical epistemology and information as a means of mental and material cognitive communication. When creating new combinations of known economic indicators of research and development, we mean that their main result is the resulting fragments of new scientific knowledge, rather than secondary forms of publications, citations, financial expenditures, which may be non-equivalent to the main results.