Comparing Methods of Assessing R&D Efficiency in Latin-American Countries

Scientific and technological activities have a growing importance in the economic development of a region. The aim of this paper is to analyze how efficient scientific research and experimental development (R&D) are in terms of public expenditure. The effect of public expenditure on the ability to innovate, measured by the number of patents, publications and invention indices is evaluated. We propose the use of tools from the area of Operations Research as Data Envelopment Analysis and the Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution, as well as methodologies from Computational Intelligence such as Self Organizing Maps to visualize the joint behavior of the different countries. The results obtained confirm an imbalance among countries in the area, imbalance that should be addressed in order to increase the global efficiency of the region.