The EU Council Working Party on Research will continue its discussions on Thursday 7 October on the draft ‘pact’ for Research and Innovation (R&I) in Europe - a draft that is expected to be formally adopted by the end of the Slovenian EU Council Presidency in December (see EUROPE 12765/9).
This pact will formalise the principles to be implemented and the commitments to be met for R&I at national level. This is particularly true in financial terms.
In the draft “pact” the European Commission presented a year ago (see EUROPE 12571/9), it suggested that the States reaffirm the objective of investing 3% of the EU’s GDP in R&I, that they commit themselves to collectively raising the total public effort in R&I to 1.25% of the EU’s GDP by 2030, and that they devote 5% of their national public funding to joint research programmes and European partnerships.
The European institution also called on the EU Member States, which are lagging behind the EU average, to increase their investments by 50% over the next 5 years.
A draft “pact” reworked by the EU Council Presidency, of which EUROPE has obtained a copy, will be examined in a working group on Thursday.
In this document, the last three percentages mentioned above have been maintained. However, they are now presented as “sub-targets” towards which it would be good “to collectively make progress”, with a view to achieving the 3% target for investment of EU GDP in R&I.
This formulation, somewhat less ambitious than the one initially envisaged by the European Commission, is justified in the draft under discussion by the need to “strike the right balance between a sufficiently ambitious ERA [European Research Area] agenda and one that is achievable and realistic, including for Member States at national level”.
At present, the EU invests just over 2% of its GDP in R&I. Its American and Chinese competitors invest at least 3%, MEPs noted with concern last October (see EUROPE 12572/18). (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)