EU must double research budget says Rasmussen

By Karen Carstens

Date: 11/03/04

DANISH Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has suggested the EU double its research budget in an effort to catch up with the United States.

In a seven-point plan, the Danish premier has proposed that the EU's appropriations for research should be increased from their current level of €4 billion to a total of 8bn euro, so that Europe can meet the objectives of the Lisbon strategy.

The plan includes a proposal to reserve a greater proportion of the Community budget for research programmes and to establish a common European fund for basic research.

Such funds could easily be freed up "by carrying out real reforms" of the EU's much-maligned Common Agricultural Policy, according to Danish Liberal MEP Karin Riis-Jørgensen.

Money for research could also be obtained by "focussing structural fund appropriations only on the most necessary areas, so that these items would account for a smaller proportion of the Community budget", Riis-Jørgensen added.

To help Rasmussen plead his case, the MEP has put a Parliamentary question to the European Commission.

Fogh Rasmussen, speaking in The Hague recently, also proposed that a "European research, development and education area" be formed to plug the EU "brain drain" and rev up Europe's economic motor.

"Out of the 101 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics awarded in the last 15 years, 68 went to the US and only 23 to Europe," he said.

"The US spends a greater percentage of its GDP on research and development than the EU. The US has more hi-tech patents per citizen than the EU.

"They have more researchers as part of the total labour force than the EU," Rasmussen, who has been heralded as an energetic and dynamic leader, added.

"The problem is not that the Union is training insufficient numbers of new researchers - on the contrary. The problem is that Europe is having difficulties holding on to the best of them. According to some estimates more than 400,000 European science and technology graduates live on the other side of the Atlantic."