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.