The big three spenders, Germany at €62 billion, France at €39 billion and the UK at €37 billion, continue to dominate the budget, accounting for 60% of the total expenditure on R&D, according to the 2009 edition of Science, Technology and Innovation in Europe, published by Eurostat.

The figures show that the majority of funding is from private sources, with Europe’s governments committing 0.76% of GDP to R&D. This compares to 0.70% in Japan and 1.03% in the US. More significantly perhaps, between 1999 and 2006 there was no increase in the percentage contribution which national governments made to R&D in Europe as a whole – though total spending did rise by 3.6% in this time

In terms of research intensity, the highest public funder is the French government, which devoted 1.01% of GDP to R&D in 2006. At the other end of the scale were the governments of Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovakia and Malta, which put less than 0.3% of GDP into their research budgets.

The equivalent of 2.3 million full-time staff worked in R&D in the EU27 in 2007, with R&D personnel accounting for 1.6% of total employment. The highest proportions of R&D personnel were in Finland at 3.2% of total employment, Sweden, 2.7% and Luxembourg 2.6%.