Member States outline their key Lisbon challenges

All 25 EU Member States presented their key Lisbon priorities and challenges at the European Business Summit in Brussels on 16 and 17 March, and improving the environment for research and development (R&D) and innovation was a recurring theme. During one session, representati...

All 25 EU Member States presented their key Lisbon priorities and challenges at the European Business Summit in Brussels on 16 and 17 March, and improving the environment for research and development (R&D) and innovation was a recurring theme.

During one session, representatives from Belgium, Italy, Estonia, Luxembourg and Sweden were asked to highlight a few key elements of their National Reform Programmes. While most pointed to the need to boost support for R&D and innovation, varying national conditions ensures that the nature of the challenge is different for each.

Nowhere is this more clearly highlighted than in the comparison between Sweden and Estonia. In 2003, Sweden invested a higher proportion of its GDP in R&D than any other country in Europe, and the challenge, according to Deputy Prime Minister Bosse Ringholm, is to maintain this leadership.

'We are currently at the top globally, spending over four per cent of GDP on research. But today's success is no guarantee of tomorrow's position, and for this reason we have put in place a national target to keep increasing the amount we spend on research,' said Mr Ringholm. In order to compliment the already high private spending on R&D in Sweden, the government aims to increase public investment in research to one per cent of GDP.

With such a richness of resources for R&D, one of the key challenges facing Sweden is to produce a sufficient quantity of researchers and scientists to exploit them. For this reason, and integral part of Sweden's wider innovation strategy is a target to increase the proportion of citizens with a higher education to 50 per cent.

The challenges facing Estonia, meanwhile, are somewhat different. While it invests more in R&D than most of the newer Member States, with the exception of the Czech Republic and Slovenia, this still only amounted to 0.77 per cent of GDP in 2003. According to the Director of Estonia's EU Secretariat, Keit Kasemets, the main challenge is trying to increase the very low level of private investment in R&D, and there are now signs that progress is being made.

There are some issues that appear common to most countries, however: 'We also need researchers, so we are offering support to universities and infrastructures in order to motivate young people to enter R&D,' revealed Mr Kasemets. Having begun the process of economic reform in the 1990s, some time before the EU launched the Lisbon strategy, Mr Kasemets is convinced that Estonia has the will and experience to deliver its reform strategy.

Belgium's State Secretary for European Affairs, Didier Donfut, believes that the practices and priorities of his country tend to be in harmony with those of the wider EU. Certainly, his country's focus on modernising the regulatory framework by simplifying or eliminating burdensome rules is a key priority at EU level also. However, while the EU has been seeking to increase overall investment in R&D since the Barcelona European Council in 2001, Mr Donfut acknowledged that the effort to reduce Belgium's public budget has had an impact on public R&D investment.

'Belgium is not bad in R&D, but we are aware that this is mainly due to the private sector,' he said. The response to this challenge, believes Mr Donfut, should be coordinated at EU level. 'We need a global strategy on R&D - we all have to be aware that R&D must be the essence of our future cooperation.'

The challenges faced by Luxembourg, one of the EU's smallest Member States, are particular to a country with a population of just 450,000 where over half of the workforce is from abroad. Nevertheless, according to Minister for Economy and Foreign Trade Jeannot Krecké, maintaining a high quality infrastructure for R&D and innovation is still a national priority.

Regardless of the amount of resources allocated to research and innovation, successfully developing new products does however rely on sufficient protection for intellectual property rights, which Mr Krecké says is a problem at the moment. Without more support for a Community Patent, Europe can't hope to attract high value goods and services, he said. Regarding the EU's target of investing three per cent of GDP in research, the minister concluded: 'We shouldn't worry too much about three per cent targets - it's the quality of the research that counts.'

Finally, Italy has its own particular challenges to overcome, with the Minister of European Policy, Giorgio La Malfa, highlighting in particular the contrast in economic fortunes between the North and South of the country. While unemployment in the North is around three per cent, in the South the figure is between 15 and 20 per cent. One way that the government hopes to reduce these disparities is by investing significantly in education, science and innovation in the South of the country, Mr La Malfa revealed.

Given that Italy's overall investment in R&D was 1.16 per cent of GDP in 2002, the government feels that raising this to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2010 is a more realistic target than the EU figure of three per cent. In order to focus investments towards innovative areas of research, 12 strategic programmes have been launched in fields such as health, aerospace, materials, and energy saving, Mr La Malfa concluded.

So while the particular situation and strategy of each Member State varies greatly, including their approach to R&D and innovation, all acknowledge the role that knowledge-based investments will play in achieving the goals of the relaunched Lisbon agenda.

Countries

Belgium, Estonia, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden