‘No knowledge, no future for Europe’

By Jerome Glass

Date: 31/03/05

The European Commission's relaunch of the Lisbon Strategy has placed even greater emphasis on funding for R&D. The link between knowledge on the one hand and growth and jobs on the other has been strongly emphasised, with Janez Potocnik, the research commissioner, pointing out that "the key objective in designing FP7, is to have research programmes that contribute to achieving our revamped Lisbon goals, in other words to leverage knowledge for growth".

Although an overall R&D investment target of 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2010 was set at a European summit in Barcelona in 2002, there has been little progress towards meeting it. R&D spending grew by 2.5% in 2003, but it would have to grow by an estimated 6.5% a year in order for the 2010 target to be met. Overall, the EU now spends 1.93% of GDP on R&D, some way behind the US (2.64%) and Japan (3.17%). The differences between member states go some way to explaining this, with Sweden spending 4.27% of GDP on R&D compared with Poland's 0.56%.

Although EU-based researchers produce 41% of all scientific papers, compared with 31% for the US, European papers are quoted far less and, since 1980, US researchers have won over twice as many prizes as their European counterparts. The concern about this 'knowledge gap' has therefore fed into the Commission's new 'growth and jobs' strategy. Commissioner Potocnik argues: "No knowledge, no future for Europe."

Article discusses the possible contribution of the EU's proposed Seventh Framework Programme, the main mechanism for funding European research, to the goals the EU set itself in the recent relaunch of the Lisbon Strategy.