Medical Research: Spending on Medical Research Falls in U.S. While Growing Globally - by Dennis Thompson

Spending on medical research is waning in the United States, and this trend could have dire consequences for patients, physicians and the health care industry as a whole, a new analysis reveals.

America is losing ground to Asia, the research shows. And if left unaddressed, this decline in spending could rob the world of cures and treatments for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, depression and other conditions that plague the human race, said lead author Dr. Hamilton Moses III, founder and chairman of the Alerion Institute, a Virginia-based think tank.

Moses noted that a great expansion in medical research that began in the 1980s helped revolutionize cancer prevention and treatment, and turned HIV/AIDS from a fatal illness to a chronic condition.
But between 2004 and 2012, the rate of investment growth declined to 0.8 percent a year in the United States, compared with a growth rate of 6 percent a year from 1994 to 2004, the report notes.

"Common diseases that are devastating are not receiving as much of a push as would be occurring if the earlier rate of investment had been sustained," Moses said.

America now spends about $117 billion a year on medical research, which is about 4.5 percent of the nation's total health care expenses, the researchers report Jan. 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Cuts in government funding are the main cause for flagging investment in research, they found. Meanwhile, the share of U.S. medical research funding from private industry has increased to 58 percent in 2012, compared with 46 percent in 1994.

This has caused the United States' total share of global research funding -- both public and private -- to decline from 57 percent in 2004 to 44 percent in 2012, the report noted.

While the United States still maintains its preeminence in medical research, Asian countries threaten to take the lead. Asia -- particularly China -- tripled investment from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $9.7 billion in 2012, according to the report.

"There's no question we should be concerned about the U.S. decline in global investment for medical research," said Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, who wrote an accompanying editorial. "In the direction we're going, we're going to lose our innovation and competitiveness globally."

Signs of slippage are beginning to show, the authors noted. China filed 30 percent of global life science patent applications in 2011, compared with 24 percent from the United States. From 1981 to 2011, the share of "highly valuable" patents filed in the United States by American inventors decreased from 73 percent to 59 percent, while all other countries analyzed increased their share.

Read more: Spending on Medical Research Falls in U.S. While Growing Globally - MedicineNet

Davos 2015: Thought Leaders at Davos See Opportunities in 2015 - BY Matt McAllester

A number of pressing crises loom over this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting currently taking place in Davos—including the tumbling price of oil, an upcoming election in Greece that could deliver a blow to a still fragile European Union and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris—but the event also provides the world’s thought leaders with an opportunity to discuss reasons to be hopeful in the coming year.

That was the focus of a lunch discussion hosted by TIME on Wednesday, during which participants identified global bright spots in the fields of science and technology. The event, moderated by TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs, featured portrait photographer Platon; Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn; Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley; and France Cordova, Director of the National Science Foundation.

Gibbs opened the event by noting that journalists at TIME cover the challenges and crises the world faces, “but if we don’t also look at progress, at the quiet or noisy explosions of creativity, of innovation, of invention, then we’re going to miss the story.”

Cordova, an astrophysicist who was previously President of Purdue University in Indiana, spoke about the importance of the National Science Foundation’s role in funding what she called “basic” research. “All innovation is based on discovery,” she told the gathering, adding that she expected “breakthroughs to be made in our understanding of the 95% of the universe that we don’t know about.”

Read more: Thought Leaders at Davos See Opportunities in 2015 | TIME

The Global Economy: Why Your Financial Future Is In Danger - by Lynn Parramore,

Alan Taylor, a professor and Director of the Center for the Evolution of the Global Economy at the University of California, Davis, has conducted, along with Moritz Schularick, ground-breaking research on the history and role of credit, partly funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. 

He finds that today’s advanced economies depend on private sector credit more than anything we have ever seen before. His work and that of his colleagues call into question the assumption that was commonplace before 2008, that private credit flows are primarily forces for stability and predictability in economies.

If current trends continue, Taylor warns, our economic future could be very different from our recent past, when financial crises were relatively rare. Crises could become more commonplace, which will impact every stage of our financial lives, from cradle to retirement. 

Do we just fasten our seatbelts for a bumpy ride, or is there a way to smooth the path ahead? Taylor discusses his findings and thoughts about how to safeguard the financial system in the interview that follows. This interview was conducted by Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

For the complete interview click here:: Why Your Financial Future Is In Danger

European Labor Market: Number of European Freelance Professionals Soars

A recent report on  ‘independent professionals’ working in Europe shows that the number of European freelancers has grown by over 80% since 2000.

The study, published by Stéphane Rapelli on behalf of the European Forum of Independent Professionals (EFIP), shows that while the number of standard employees stagnated over the past decade, the number of freelancers has risen by 82%.  EFIP is a pan European group of bodies that represent the needs of Independent, freelance, self employed and contract workers.

Some of the key findings of this report are that the top 4 freelance nations by numbers of these independent professionals are in Italy – 1.69m, Britain 1.61m, Germany – 1.53m and France– 0.73.

Many of these freelancers work in technical, scientific and professional areas, although there are major differences between countries. 53% are educated to degree level, and 61% are aged between 25 and 49.

Of more interest, perhaps, is the change in freelance numbers over the past three years, since the economic downturn hit the continent.

The number of freelancers has boomed in certain states – notably France (up 36%), the UK (up 25%), and Germany (up 24%), but has declined in Italy (down 1%) and Spain (down 9%).

In the area of Internet marketing Britain remains Europe's  no 1 country hiring the most free lance specialized digital marketers and has continued to grow even faster than most markets with an increase from April last year of 215%, compared to the global average of 124%.

In the past year, Internet marketing spending increased in Britain by 279%. Germany (255%), Switzerland (127%) and Austria (270%) also experience dramatic growth.

The advantages of working freelance, however, do not come without hard work and dedication for success. In an economic climate with high unemployment rates and with wages stagnating as companies and businesses in Europe are trying to make savings, freelance work is expected to increase as it is seen as an attractive alternative and cost cutting benefit to having full time employees.

For graduates leaving University, freelance work seems like a sensible and viable option to make. Presently the average professional freelancer working +40 hours a week can earn approximately euro 68.000 a year, more than double the averageEuropean  professional worker’s salary of euro 31.000

This trend in the western world's labor environment is expected not only to produce a more competitive and productive workforce, but also turn the presently weakened labor force into more of an independent and united force as it relates to the global corporate world.

EU-Digest

The Most Depressing Economic Idea of 2012: The (Near) End of Growth - by Jordan Weissmann

Even by the standards of a field known as the dismal science, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon is a remarkably gloomy thinker. This summer, while most of us were busy fretting about the tepid U.S. recovery, he managed to up the ante with a paper that looked 90 years down the line and asked, "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?" As in, over for good.

His answer wasn't quite a straightforward, "yes," but it was nearly as bleak. Gordon predicted that a mix of technological stagnation and economic headwinds could feasibly slow the economy down to a crawling, pre-industrial growth rate, as mapped out in the green line on his graph below. With the new year just hours away here in the U.S., I thought it would be a good time to revisit my nominee for the most depressing economic idea of 2012, along with excerpts from a conversation I had with Gordon about his work a few months back.


Read more: The Most Depressing Economic Idea of 2012: The (Near) End of Growth - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic