South Korea retained the top country in the world for the second straight year in terms of investment in research and development for its economic size.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said on Wednesday that the country spent four-point-29 percent of its gross domestic product(GDP) in R&D in 2014, ranking first in the world.

In terms of the amount invested in R&D, the United States came in first, dishing out at 456-point-nine billion U.S. dollars in 2014, followed by China, Japan, Germany and France.

The ministry said that South Korea’s cumulative spending on R&D is far lower than those of the U.S., Japan and other advanced countries because they invested more than two percent of their GDP in R&D since the 1980s. South Korea did not reach the two percent level until 1994.