Prof. Elies MolinsAsociación de Personal Investigador

del CSIC - Spain

INES-WFSW Seminar Berlin, May 31st, 2007

South of Europe

• The center of gravity of the scientific knowledge has moved from East (China, Persia, Egypt) in old times to Europe and, more recently, to US and Japan.

• Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece (SIPEL) gave important contributions to science and technology. Think on mathematics, navigation, medicine, architecture, etc.

• Specially in the XX century, lots of SIPEL researchers developed their careers outside his country of origin.

Four types of indicators

• Human resources in R&D and attractiveness of S&T professions

• Public and private investment in R&D

• Scientific and technological productivity

• Impact of R&D on economic competitiveness and employment

# researchers

• Most of the data from EC report: “Key Figures 2001, Towards a European Research Area”

• Show departure points and tendencies.

• SIPEL: Less than 4 per 000 workforce.

1.- HUMAN RESOURCES

Business Enterprises

Government Institutions

Higher Education

Greece 2315 2000 10471

Italy 26192 13697 24997

Portugal 1994 3445 8243

Spain 15178 11934 33840

EU-15 459450 130636 315212

US 1015700 46098 136936

Japan 433758 30987 178418

Number of researchers (1999). 3rd European Report on S&T Indicators, 2003

growth of # res.

• Although a higher growth (except Italy), the convergence is slow due to a large absolute difference.

Correlation between

investment and # of researchers

PhDs growth

• Lots of them stabilize outside (brain drain).

• Currently, # of students decrease in science careers (specially physics, but also chemistry, geology, maths, but not biology).

R&D investment

• SIPEL far from EU…• EU far from US &

Japan

• Tremendous effort is needed (EU 3% in 2010)

2.- INVESTMENT IN R&D

R&D investment growth

• Good rates… but enough ? (perhaps for Portugal)

• Experts consider that R&D growth should be 5% more than GDP growth.

%R&D industry

• Innovative effort of industries

• Public effort should be followed by an increasing R&D effort of industries.

…and tendency

• Heterogeneous results on the growing of the R&D industry investment: different industry structure (i.e. SME based) or different administration policies.

Public investment

• SIPEL: not so bad respect to EU.

• EU far from US and Japan.

Public R&D growth

• EU growing is slower than US and Japan increasing R&D budget.

Military R&D

• Spain has included some defense budgeds in R&D to improve figures.

• Large in US

Venture capital

• Investment per 000 Gross Domestic Product.

Patents per inhabitant

• SIPEL at the bottom… (also for US patents)

• but Greece and Spain have larger growing rates the EU average.

3.- Scientific & Technological Productivity

# publications

• Lowest in the # per inhabitant, but also very high per growth annual rate.

Highly cited papers

Public-private cooperation

• Technology transfer• Simbiotic relationship• Always a challenge

4.- SOCIAL IMPACT

High-tech employment

• Also an indication of the innovation capacity.

Knowledge Intensive services

employment

• Tendencies inverse to current situation: slow convergence.

% of high-tech exports

• Enhancement of EU due to intra-EU trade

• Japan decreasing (-8%)

Others

• Erawatch: similar or improved tendencies

• Slow convergence of SIPEL to EU

• Bologna impact + lower interest for science and technology formation

• What about EU convergence to US&Japan?

• Convergence is sustainable?

Pushing new politics

about financial benefit

FOR SOCIAL BENEFIT

For discussion

The demography expansion together

with the improvement in quality of life implies an application of a sustainable development model everywhere.

This is a real challenge for the R&D system.