This UNESCO report titled Research and development: USA, Europe and Japan increasingly challenged by emerging countries from few months ago has some interesting data:

While the USA, Europe and Japan may still be leading the global research and development (R&D) effort, they are increasingly being challenged by emerging countries, especially China.

I wish the report had a concise definition of what they include in R&D.  For example, according to the report, there are 1.1M researchers in China and the number in US is similar.  Does that include all product development engineers?  If so, the number sounds a bit low (1 in a 1,000 persons in China is an engineer?) .  In any case, one of the key reasons for the rise of emerging economies is the Internet:

This transformation is being helped by the extremely rapid development of the Internet, which has become a powerful vector for disseminating knowledge. Throughout the world, the number of connections leaped noticeably from 2002 to 2007. But this advance is even more significant in emerging countries. In 2002, just over 10 out of 100 people, globally, used the Internet. There are over 23 users per 100 today. And this proportion rose from 1.2 to 8 in the same period in Africa, from 2.8 to 16 in the Arab States, and from 8.6 to 28 in Latin America.

In any case, here is a bit of benchmark data about R&D  budgets:

Even if it is hard to quantify the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, the Report points out that the global recession could have an impact on R&D budgets, which are often vulnerable to cuts in times of crisis. American firms, which are among the most active in terms of R&D, slashed their budgets by 5 – 25% in 2009. As a result, the USA has been harder hit than Brazil, China and India, which has enabled these countries to catch up faster than they would have without the crisis. Finally the Report stresses the need to intensify scientific cooperation, particularly between countries in the South.

The full report is here.