munich

Cooperation between scientists in different European Union (EU) countries has increased significantly over the past decade, according to statistics released by the European Commission last week.

In the ten years from 1985, the funding of research and development in European collaborative programmes rose from 6 to 16 per cent of total spending. That includes the commission's Framework programmes, Eureka and the European-level laboratories.

Framework programmes are designed to stimulate cooperation between researchers in different countries and between industry — particularly small and medium-sized enterprises — and academics. The report says that more than 200,000 such links were established between 1990 and 1996, and that 90 per cent of these were international.

Overall, the statistics show that Europe's international research standing has changed little. The EU invests less in science and technology than its major competitors, the United States and Japan, as a percentage of gross domestic product (1.8, compared with 2.5 and 2.8 respectively). And the number of researchers in Europe is much lower — 5 per 1,000 of population. Scientific output, in terms of publications, remains equal to that of the United States, and above that of Japan.

European-level funding is becoming increasingly important for research. Although the proportion of national public expenditure on research and development fell from an average of 3.5 per cent in 1985 to 2.6 per cent in 1995, research's share of the commission's general budget rose from 2.1 to 5.1 per cent.