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.