Some indicators of development of knowledge based society based on knowledge economy of Republic of Serbia and selected countries

Abstract

The study analyses three representative indicators of the knowledge based society based on knowledge economy: a) educational structure of workers in 2015, b) the alternation of spending for research and development in GDP for 2010-2014 and c) internet usage levels in 2015 for Serbia, EU and countries form the region. A serious lag of Serbia behind the EU has been noticed in all of analysed indicators. In particular, Serbia has a lower share of highly-educated workers in total number of employees (24.9%) comparing to the EU (33.4% ). Approximately 35.9 euro per capita is spent in Serbia for research and development, which is 16 times less than EU average and 12 times less than in Slovenia. Comparing to Serbia, Romania is the only country from the region that invested less than Serbia (28.8 euro per capita) in R&D in 2014. Despite multi-year growing trend of internet use in Serbia, the rate of growth in 2007-2015 was insufficient to reach the EU average and surpass countries form the region.

Keywords

• knowledge society
• economy of knowledge
• education
• investment in research and development
• use of internet