Funding for flagship European R&D program should double, report says

A new report from a high-level advisory group to the European Union (EU) calls for doubling funding of the successor to Horizon 2020 , the seven-year, €77 billion ($88 billion) research program that will end in three years.

Horizon 2020 funds both basic and applied research through three main areas : Excellent Science, which focuses on basic research; Industrial Leadership, which expedites the development of technologies by small- and medium-sized businesses; and Societal Challenges, which funds potential solutions to social and economic problems.

The program has proven so popular among the research community that only 11% of Horizon 2020 proposals have earned funding, according to a recent evaluation of the program. Horizon 2020 would require an additional €62 billion to fund all the proposals that are deemed high quality. Looking toward the next program, the report recommends an approval rate of between 15% and 20%, with funding for at least 30% of high-quality proposals.

Member states contribute funds to Horizon 2020 and other EU programs through customs duties, value-added taxes, and other mechanisms. The EU-managed efforts supplement funding provided by the governments of individual EU member states.

According to the advisory group, the EU should strive to “align its investment with that of its main competitors,” such as the US, China, South Korea, and Japan. In 2015, EU member states invested more than €96 billion in R&D, with Germany, France, and the UK contributing a combined €30.8 billion. The EU’s R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP was around 2%, compared with 2.8% for the US and 4.2% for South Korea.

In 2000 the European Commission, which manages the EU’s day-to-day business, set a target for the EU and its member states to invest 3% of GDP in R&D. As of 2015, only three countries—Sweden, Austria, and Denmark—had reached that benchmark. Achieving the 3% target through EU and member-state investment plans is “essential,” the advisory group says. Meeting the target would require an additional €150 billion of public- and private-sector investment. Tax credits and cofunding mechanisms are recommended as ways to spur private interest in R&D investment.

In other R&D matters, the report welcomes the EU’s recent decision to fund defense science and technology. However, the group advises that defense funding decisions be made separately from the recommended doubling of nondefense research spending.

The European Commission will receive a formal proposal for Horizon 2020’s successor next year.

This article is adapted from a 13 July post on FYI , which reports on federal science policy with a focus on the physical sciences. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.