Health researchers (in full-time equivalent) per million inhabitants, by WHO Region (first set of charts)
Published: January 2017
The number of researchers in the fields of health and medical sciences ("health researchers") is monitored, by country, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
What you see
The data visualization above compares the number of full-time equivalent (FTE)1 health researchers2 per million inhabitants by country and by WHO region. Regional weighted averages for FTE health researchers (top chart) and females as a proportion of all health researchers (top chart) are provided. The weighted regional averages are derived from the 56 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 (bottom chart).
- The WHO Western Pacific region has approximately 13.5 times (190) more FTE health researchers per million inhabitants than the WHO African region (14) (top chart).
- Based on the data from 56 countries, although female researchers account for almost half of the FTE health researchers, the proportion ranges from approximately 55% in the Western Pacific region to only 22% in the African region. (Click on a region on the top chart to see the region-specific % ).
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 Burkina Faso has approximately 4 times more FTE health researchers per million inhabitants (22) than the weighted average for this income group (5).
-- Selecting the high income group shows that six countries exceeded the weighted average (363) for the countries in this group , in the top two are Singapore and the Netherlands where 1142 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
1 The 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.
2 Medical and health sciences (for R&D data) include basic medicine; clinical medicine; health sciences; health biotechnology; and other medical sciences.