A few years ago (in fact in 2006) I considered the issue of how the support for astronomy in any country depends on its economy. It’s an interesting question, but the problem is how to measure an index of astronomical vitality in a country.

The very simplest and crudest measure is just to count the number of International Astronomical Union (IAU) members present in any country. The IAU is recognized as the main international organization for professional astronomers.

Fig 1: The relation between IAU members per million of population and GDP/capita (click on figure to enlarge)

Such an approach has several pitfalls – although membership is free, some countries encourage more astronomers to join the IAU than others. Many professional astronomers never join the IAU, though hopefully the number of IAU members per million of population is some kind of index of astronomical activity.

Another index might be to count papers authored by astronomers resident in each country. There are two big problems here; how do you count multi-authored papers where the authors come from several countries? And how do you even count the papers at all, given that the ADS database of astronomical papers often has omitted data on institutional affiliation of authors?

In spite of these problems, interesting facts emerged when I used these indices and correlated the results with GDP/capita, a broad measure of economic activity or national wealth.

First of all, a little demographics. In 2006 there were 197 independent countries in the world, and 85 of them had individual IAU members residing in them. There were then 8970 such members. Sixty-two of the countries actually adhered to the IAU, and in fact 76 per cent of the total world population resides in countries that are national IAU members. This statistic arises because nearly all large population countries are IAU national members (all except for Pakistan and Bangladesh with populations over 100 million are IAU national members). The 112 countries with no astronomers (or rather no IAU members) were mainly smaller, and together accounted for less than a billion people, compared with a total world population of about 6.5 billion.

Next I collected data on IAU individual members, on country populations and on GDP/capita, all for the year 2006. The IAU website gives the data on the first of these parameters, while the photius website www.photius.com/rankings/index_2006.html gave the data on population and GDP.

In the figure (Fig. 1) I plot the number of IAU members per million of population against GDP/capita for the 62 IAU national member countries in 2006. The points to note are:

• IAU members/million are mainly in the range zero to 13 (the USA has about 8/million);
• As expected, there is a strong correlation between IAU members/million and GDP/capita;
• Estonia has by far the most astronomers/million of any country at 17.7 (no doubt an anomaly that arose after the break-up of the Soviet Union rather than an especially enlightened Estonian government!);
• Several wealthy countries have anomalously few astronomers (especially Norway, Austria, Japan, China Taipei (Taiwan) and S. Korea).

Adding 23 non-IAU member countries but with professional astronomers doesn’t change the picture much, except that wealthy countries like the United Arab Emirates and Singapore have anomalously few astronomers for their high GDP/capita, with only about one IAU member per million in each case. In fact these 23 countries mainly have zero to three IAU individual members per million.

What can we learn from the number of refereed astronomical papers coming out of IAU member countries? Does this also correlate with the economy? I was able to use ADS affiliation fields to count the papers published between 1976 and 2005 inclusive. For multi-author papers, if all authors were from the same country, that paper was counted once; but if all N authors came from N countries, that paper was counted N times. I then found N per IAU astronomer. This index is a measure of astronomer productivity, notwithstanding the fact that a significant number of astronomers are not IAU individual members.

Fig 2: The relation between papers published per IAU astronomer per year and GDP per capita in IAU member countries

Figure 2 plots papers per IAU astronomer per year (averaged over the previous 30 year period) against GDP/capita for the 62 IAU member countries in 2006. Once again, there is a strong correlation. The stronger economies also have the more productive astronomers. Perhaps the interesting points come from the data points which are outliers. Thus Russia, Germany and Norway have the most productive astronomers. Germany tops the list with about 2.3 papers/IAU member/year.

Tajikistan at 2.0 papers/IAU member/year is also high, but the small statistics on IAU members (only 6 astronomers) make this figure unreliable. Note that Norway has fewer astronomers than other wealthy countries, but their productivity is high.

Astronomers in Ireland, Iceland and the USA appear to be somewhat less productive in relation to their economies than if they followed the mean trend.

Once again, we can add 23 further non-member countries which still have professional astronomers, and we find that these astronomers generally have low productivity, with about a half of a paper per astronomer per year being typical.

There may be messages we can learn from these correlations, in spite of the many cautions which need to be exercised. One is, that if we want to promote astronomy throughout the world, then the best way is to have strong economies. Possibly astronomy is not going to flourish in countries where the economy is weak. Unfortunately most governments see astronomy as expensive, not a high national priority and moreover politicians are generally blind to the educational benefits of promoting astronomical science in their universities.

(Written 8 July 2009; based on an article by the writer in ‘Astronomy for the Developing World’ edited by J.B. Hearnshaw and P. Martinez, published by Cambridge Univ. Press (2007)).

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