Eastern Europe’s governments must invest in excellence
As Europe prepares for another Framework programme, research policymakers are still struggling to answer a question crucial to Europe’s future competitiveness: what to do about the underperformers.
Framework 7 was the first Framework programme to include the eastern European nations that joined the EU in 2004. During the programme, the European Commission started monitoring the euphemistically named “catching-up countries”, defined as those where national R&D spending was well below the long-term EU average of 2 per cent of GDP.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, eastern European countries lacked the funds to grow individual centres of excellence from the wreckage of their well-funded but centralised research systems. Most still spend less than 1 per cent of GDP on R&D.
What’s more, public spending in these countries makes up only a small share of the overall R&D budget. In Poland, for example, public research funding accounts for only 0.4 per cent of GDP.
Some countries are growing their R&D budgets. Notably, in Estonia, spending rose from 0.6 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 1.62 per cent in 2010, outdoing Spain and Italy and close to the UK’s 1.77 per cent for the same year. This is mainly down to Estonia’s lively information and communications technology activities, which have built up around Skype, an Estonian invention.
Nonetheless, R&D spending remains a problem in many other countries, and this is having a knock-on effect on participation in the EU Framework programmes. Most Framework 7 awards, including the prestigious grants from the European Research Council, are based on excellence. These criteria hand the wealthier and more experienced higher education institutions of north-west Europe a huge advantage.
In the first five years of Framework 7, between 2007 and 2011, Latvia won only €29 million, Slovakia €35m and Bulgaria €48m. Compare this with the Netherlands’ €1.3 billion or Sweden’s €800m.
As a result, many countries lose money on Framework 7. According to Jerzy Langer, a former adviser to the European Commission, Poland’s return of €210m is only half of what the country paid into the programme—although, as Zygmunt Krasiński, a senior research manager in the country, shows on page 3 of this supplement, research institutions are working hard to change this.
Langer blames the situation on a lack of national funding, especially in industry. “International networking is also still too small, so there are too few researchers to compete with the west,” he adds.
The simplest solution to this—putting money aside for weaker countries—is out of the question. Horizon 2020 cannot budge from its commitment to excellence without undermining its raison d’être.
Even the countries that stand to benefit might see such a fund as a badge, or benefit, of failure. Governments are unlikely to divert funds towards the struggling institutes or universities in their countries, says Anna Voseckova, who heads the Czech Republic’s research liaison office in Brussels. “I am sure this would not be approved of by national policymakers.”
Instead, programmes such as buddy schemes and salary top-ups for eastern European scientists have been proposed to help them onto the Framework programme ladder. EU research policymakers are also putting pressure on local politicians to boost national funding. Many politicians, especially in the Council of Ministers, are getting tired of the governments of catching-up countries complaining about their plight when there is so little national will to do something about it.
In southern Europe, the financial crisis makes it hard for countries to boost research funding. But eastern Europe, with its budding economies, large student populations and knack for reinvention, has no such excuse.
National funding is urgently needed to build up eastern and southern Europe’s strengths in industrial research and excellence in specific areas of science. It may be that no single approach suits every country, but there is a strong will among the researchers in those countries to be better. And where there’s a will, there’s usually a way.