Theme 20 of 43

Science, Technology, Scholarships & Academic Output

Brazil invests less than a third of what South Korea invests in research, concentrates 70% of scholarships in the Southeast, and leaves 85% of patents in foreign hands.

The 227,257 scholarships registered by CNPq in a single year, cross-referenced with Brazil's performance in PISA — the international exam that measures math, science and reading proficiency among students in 65 countries — show the same country from two different angles: an education system that trains poorly and a science policy that invests little and distributes the little it invests unevenly. The two problems feed each other.

Brazil in PISA: always near the bottom

In math, Brazil ranks 57th among 65 countries evaluated; in science, 58th. These aren't middling positions — they're tail positions, behind practically every developed country and much of Latin America. This baseline performance directly compromises the country's future capacity to train scientists, engineers and competitive researchers.

Brazil ranks among the world's worst in math and science — the base of the funnel that should feed national scientific output is already weak.

R&D: Brazil's embarrassment

Brazil invests 1.2% of GDP in research and development; South Korea invests 4.5% — almost four times more. That investment gap explains a good part of the technological distance between two countries that started from similar development levels a few decades ago and today occupy completely different positions in the global innovation hierarchy.

Brazil invests four times less in research and development than South Korea — the technological gap between the two countries isn't an accident, it's a budget line.

Scholarships: absurd concentration

Seventy percent of all CNPq research scholarships go to the Southeast; the North and Northeast, combined, are left with just 15%. Science-funding policy reproduces and deepens regional inequality instead of correcting it — whoever already has a strong university and established research infrastructure gets more resources to keep growing, while the rest of the country continues with residual funding.

Brazilian science is elite for elite — research funding reproduces the same regional inequality present in nearly every public policy in the country.

Scientific output: quantity vs. quality

Brazil publishes about 70,000 scientific articles a year, ranking 13th in the world by publication volume. But volume doesn't translate into impact: citations per article are low, suggesting Brazilian academic output is abundant in quantity and questionable in quality — a classic symptom of an academic culture that prioritizes publishing for its own sake over the relevance of what's published.

Brazil publishes a lot and is cited little — many articles, little real impact at the frontier of knowledge.

CAPES: distribution of programs by region

The North accounts for just 7% of the country's graduate programs, and of those, only 10% receive a high grade (7 or above) from CAPES. In the Southeast, 55% of programs are concentrated there, and 60% of them score high. Excellence-level graduate education is practically inaccessible to anyone studying outside the South-Southeast-Center-West axis.

The North has just 7% of the country's graduate programs, and only 10% of them reach a high grade — academic excellence remains concentrated where it always was.

INPI: patents filed vs. granted

Of the patents granted by the National Institute of Industrial Property, 85% belong to non-residents — that is, to foreign companies and inventors. Brazilian residents keep just 15% of the patents granted in their own country. Brazil registers little of what it invents because, to a large extent, whoever invents and patents here isn't Brazilian.

Eighty-five percent of patents granted in Brazil belong to foreigners — Brazilians innovate little and register even less.

PISA: Brazilian ranking by skill

Breaking down performance by skill, Brazil ranks 57th in math, 58th in science and 54th in reading, always among the last-placed of the 65 countries evaluated. It's a worse performance than every OECD country and much of Latin America — a warning about the educational base that does, or doesn't, sustain the country's entire chain of scientific production.

Among the world's worst in every skill assessed — worse than every OECD country and many Latin American neighbors.

CNPq: scholarship distribution by broad field

Exact Sciences — engineering and computer science — receive 35% of all CNPq scholarships, the largest share among the broad fields. The Humanities get just 8%, the smallest share of all. Brazilian science funding has a clear bias in favor of technology and against the social sciences and humanities, even though the latter are essential to understanding and changing the very problems the country faces.

Research scholarships concentrate in exact sciences — the social sciences and humanities remain a secondary priority in Brazilian science funding.

Explanatory hypotheses

The low baseline educational performance — evidenced by PISA — helps explain why R&D investment doesn't convert into proportional scientific results: there's no foundation of well-trained students to sustain the research pyramid. The regional concentration of scholarships perpetuates inequalities that already exist in other dimensions of Brazilian life. The low patenting rate among residents reflects both the lack of investment and a culture of technological dependence dating back decades. And the funding bias in favor of exact sciences reveals a policy that privileges technology over the social sciences — ignoring that real development also depends on strong institutions, and institutions are what the humanities study.

Policy implications

Investing more and better in basic education is a precondition for any sustainable improvement in PISA performance. Decentralizing research scholarships and graduate programs would help develop scientific hubs outside the South-Southeast axis. Tax and credit incentives for patenting by residents could stimulate domestic innovation. Evaluating and funding social-science programs with the same rigor given to technical fields would value a field that's currently sidelined. And investing in teacher training at excellence-level universities — not just advanced research — could help break the cycle that begins in poor educational performance and ends in technological dependence.