Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade-off in allocations of
national R&D investments. Government funding, and spending in the higher
education sector, seem to encourage publications, whereas other components such
as industrial funding, and spending in the business sector, encourage
patenting. Our results help explain why the US trails the EU in publications,
because of its focus on industrial funding - some 70% of its total R&D
investment. Conversely, it also helps explain why the EU trails the US in
patenting. Government funding is indicated as a negative incentive to
high-quality patenting. The models here can also be used to predict an output
indicator for a country, once the appropriate input indicator is known. This
usually is done within a dataset for a single year, but the process can be
extended to predict outputs a few years into the future, if reasonable
forecasts can be made of the input indicators. We provide new forecasts about
the further relationships of the US, the EU-27, and the PRC in the case of
publishing. Models for individual countries may be more successful, however,
than regression models whose parameters are averaged over a set of countries.