Health researchers (in full-time equivalent) per million inhabitants, by income group (second set of charts)

Published: January 2022

The number of researchers in the fields of health and medical sciences ("health researchers") are collected, by country, from the UNESCO's (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Institute for Statistics (UIS), the statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat), the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

These numbers are analysed below using the data for the most recent year since 2010. (Note: not all countries have reported data on this indicator).

See also:

Health researchers (in full-time equivalent) per million inhabitants, by WHO Region (first set of charts)
Health researchers (in full-time equivalent), as a proportion of all researchers

What you see | Data sources |  Current version

What you see

The data visualization above compares the number of full-time equivalent (FTE)1 health researchers per million inhabitants by country and by income group. Weighted averages and medians for FTE health researchers (chart A) and females as a proportion of all FTE health researchers (top right) are provided. (To see the data using either of the two calculation methods, select the desired method from the two options above the charts).

The weighted averages are derived from 82 Member States for which data are available. Data need to be interpreted cautiously because of the number of missing observations, especially from countries known to develop and publish health research.

Points to note:

  • Disparities in scientific capacity between countries are significant (chart B).
  • The high income group of countries has approximately 56 times more FTE health researchers per million inhabitants (391) than the low income group of countries (7) (chart A), ranging (across the 82 countries) from 1,158 in Singapore to 0.2 in Zimbabwe.
  • Based on the data from 74 (out of 82) countries, although female researchers account for 51% of the FTE health researchers, the proportion ranges from approximately 53% in high income group to only 24% in the low income group. (Click on a region on chart A to see the region-specific % -- top right.)

To explore the data further

  • Select an income group in the top chart to filter countries within that income group ( income group averages are symbolized by the dashed vertical line in the bottom chart). For example:
    • Selecting the low income group, and then hovering the cursor on the country bar of interest (chart B), shows that Gambia has approximately 4 times more FTE health researchers per million inhabitants (31) than the weighted average for this income group (7).
    • Selecting the high income group shows that eight countries exceeded the weighted average (391) for the countries in this group, in the top two are Singapore and the Netherlands where 1,158 and 755 FTE health researchers per million inhabitants reside, respectively.
  • Click "undo" or "reset" (near the bottom of the page) or click the same element again to undo a selection. 

Data sources

 

1The full-time equivalent (FTE) of R&D personnel is defined as the ratio of working hours actually spent on R&D during a specific reference period (usually a calendar year) divided by the total number of hours conventionally worked in the same period by an individual or by a group.

Medical and health sciences (for R&D data) include basic medicine; clinical medicine; health sciences; health biotechnology; and other medical sciences.