Our 2018 forecast is a combination of the industrial, government and academic investments by the R&D spending countries of the world. The investments made by these countries are largely influenced by value and growth of their gross domestic product (GDP). We base our R&D forecasts for each country on economic forecasts and science and technology (S&T) survey data by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, along with multiple reader surveys performed by the editors of R&D Magazine. Economic data are combined with published relationships of each country’s science and technology efforts to create the R&D forecasts.