STAATSKOERANT, 31 Mei 2024 No. 50741   153 Policy proposal 15.6.6. Government must encourage more investment in data centre and cloud services. 15.7. Research and Development (R & D) The Statists 2024 report shows that countries with the highest spending in research and development are the United States of America, followed by China, Japan, Germany and South Korea. It is therefore no surprise that all these countries are in the top 10 of the most technologically advanced countries. South Africa increased its R & D spend during COVID-19, which likely explains the reason it was able to manage the pandemic much better than many countries, because its interventions were research-based. In the digital environment, research is not only important for innovation and the development of new products and services, but also in identifying the digital innovations, new digital products and services that can be leveraged to advance the country’s competitiveness and promote and reinforce localisation. Concern expressed during engagement with StatsSA was that there are duplications in the research environment among government funded institutions and even private sector organisations, which not only lead to misaligned reporting, but also the duplication and wastage of resources. This indicates that in addition to funding R & D, it is also important to streamline South African research institutions to strengthen research capabilities, optimise scarce resources and encourage innovation and technology development. Research capacity exists in government and government agencies, academia and independent research institutions. To support the digital economy, there is a need for collaboration and streamlining across all the research institutions to eliminate possible duplications that waste scarce resources necessary to support and strengthen technological development and innovation in South Africa. This alignment will therefore help to have focused research on digital technologies and innovations that can inform how South Africa can leverage data and cloud services to build and sustain a robust digital economy. 31 This gazette is also available free online at www.gpwonline.co.za