Cyprus Mail 27 November 2020 - by Staff Reporter
Cyprus remains a laggard in research & development spending as a percentage of GDP, coming in third from the bottom among the EU27, according to the latest figures issued by Eurostat on Friday.
In 2019, Cyprus’ spending on R&D stood at 0.63% of GDP – well below the EU27 average of 2.19% and one of eight countries with spending below 1%.
Research & Development (R&D) is a major driver of innovation, and R&D expenditure and intensity are two of the key indicators used to monitor resources devoted to science and technology worldwide, Eurostat noted.
In 2019, EU member states spent over €306 billion on R&D. The R&D intensity, i.e. R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP, stood at 2.19% in 2019, compared with 2.18% in 2018. Ten years earlier (2009), R&D intensity was 1.97%.
With respect to other major economies, R&D intensity in the EU was much lower than in South Korea (4.52% in 2018), Japan (3.28% in 2018) and the United States (2.82% in 2018), while it was at about the same level as in China (2.06% in 2018), higher than in the UK (1.76%) and much higher than in Russia (1.03%) and Turkey (1.03% in 2018).
The business enterprise sector continues to be the main sector in which R&D expenditure was spent, accounting for 66% of total R&D disbursed in 2019, followed by the higher education sector (22%), the government sector (11%) and the private non-profit sector (1%).
R&D intensity above 3% in Sweden, Austria and Germany
In 2019, the highest R&D intensity was recorded in Sweden (3.39%), followed by Austria (3.19%) and Germany (3.17%), all with R&D expenditure above 3% of GDP. They were ahead of Denmark (2.96%), Belgium (2.89%) and Finland (2.79%), all registering R&D expenditure close to 3.0% of GDP.
At the opposite end of the scale, eight Member States recorded a R&D intensity below 1% of GDP: Romania (0.48%), Malta (0.61%), Cyprus (0.63%), Latvia (0.64%), Ireland (0.78%), Slovakia (0.83%), Bulgaria (0.84%) and Lithuania (0.99%).
Over the last ten years, R&D intensity rose in 19 Member States, with the highest increase recorded in Belgium (from 2.00% of GDP in 2009 to 2.89% in 2019, or +0.89 percentage points (pp)), Poland (+0.66 pp), Czechia (+0.65 pp) and Greece (+0.64 pp).
In Cyprus it edged up from 0.62% the previous year.
In contrast, R&D intensity decreased in six Member States, with the highest decrease in Finland (-0.94 pp) and Ireland (-0.83 pp), while it remained stable in the remaining 2 Member States: France and Sweden.
