Biotechnology Indicators for Public Policy

The key issue is why one should be interested in biotechnology indicators and why we are interested in collecting them. From the OECD point of view, we are largely interested in them from a policy perspective. There are also two other reasons for collecting indicators. One is because they are very much of interest to academics who can use indicators to develop a longterm or deeper understanding of how economies are structured and how economies can change. Second, indicators are of interest to private investors who can use the information to guide their investment decisions in one particular technology or another. But many of the indicators for investors come too late. This has always been a problem for us because the investment community really wants to know what is happening right now and by the time our indicators are published we are usually several years too late. From a public policy perspective, we are still really in the world of expectations when we talk about biotechnology, particularly modern biotechnology. I think we are all familiar with these type of expectations, and variations of them show up in many difFerent reports from all around the world. The problem with biotech is that many of these expectations have not yet been realized except in very small ways.