implementation by 1992 of a single internal market in 

 both goods and human resources. EUREKA contributes 

 importantly to the EC's long-term S&T objectives by 

 providing a forum for cooperation between companies in 



EC nations and those in the European Free Trade 

 Association countries (Austria, Iceland, Norway, 

 Sweden, Finland and Switzerland) and, increasingly, 

 Eastern Europe. 



Policies, S&T Priorities and Capabilities of Key Member States 



European Community research activities are tied 

 intimately to national S&T regimes, due to two major 

 characteristics attaching to Community endeavors. First, 

 the European Community is effectively the twelve 

 member countries acting collectively, and it is also the 

 EC's governing institutions, which are all representative 

 of but to a large degree independent from the member 

 countries. Secondly, Community-level S&T is 

 organized, funded and managed from Brussels, but is 

 conducted overwhelmingly through contract research 

 that is actually performed at facilities, and by 

 researchers, located in individual member states and thus 

 responsive primarily to national government influences. 



This first characteristic inherently produces potential 

 for conflict, among member states with their differing 

 sets of S&T priorities, and between the EC's governing 

 entities (the Council of Ministers, the Commission, and 

 the Parliament) and various of the member state 

 governments. Since unanimity in voting is required to 

 determine the broadest and most important policy-level 

 decisions affecting Community undertakings, such as 

 the passage of the FRAMEWORK Programme, the 

 notion of a "Community" S&T policy is much more 

 ambiguous and subject to flux than are the S&T policies 

 and priorities of individual member states. 



The second characteristic means that, the 

 Commission's own limited research facilities excepted, 

 the EC S&T program is carried out at the national level, 

 by private firms, national labs and universities that - not 

 infrequently - are conducting parallel R&D activities on 

 behalf of their national governments or for national 

 markets. Thus EC support for collective S&T can be 

 viewed from one perspective as a partial pass-through 

 mechanism for research programs that are underwritten 

 by the member states as adjuncts to their own, and in 

 many instances much larger, national research programs. 

 However, EC research program management and 

 strategic S&T policy planning, by focusing on 

 overcoming or reducing transnational barriers to 

 cooperation, are serving to influence and align the 



development of a variety of national research and 

 development priorities. 



The EC programs, with increasing effectiveness, are 

 combining "top-down" identification of strategic 

 research objectives and macro-level planning for 

 collaborative resource utilization with "bottom-up" 

 proposal competition by a variety of investigator teams. 

 The latter are being encouraged by their national 

 governments (which in many cases provide research 

 overhead support through salaried employment, 

 ownership of facilities and/or state procurement policies) 

 to participate in multinational European R&D. The 

 primary objective, aside from recouping national tax 

 monies going to the EC, is to gain advantages from the 

 synergistic effects of research collaboration and in no 

 small way to strengthen the national S&T infrastructure 

 and the economic competitiveness which it stimulates. 



Thus, an assessment of European Community S&T 

 cannot be meaningful apart from a comparative 

 understanding of the S&T capabilities, structures and 

 priorities of the EC member nations, over which 

 EC -funded research is layered as an integrative device. 

 A detailed review of primary indicators of R&D 

 performance of the five principal S&T performers in the 

 EC is included in the following descriptive charts. 

 However, some generalized observations on national 

 S&T efforts are valuable to highlight areas of divergence 

 from and harmonization with the EC programs. 



The Importance of the "Big Three" Members 



• EC R&D performance is overwhelmingly 

 dependent on Germany, France and the United 

 Kingdom, with Italy and the Netherlands adding 

 significant contributions to public, civil 

 expenditures. 



The top three EC countries in R&D expenditures 

 (Germany, France and the United Kingdom) account for 

 over three-quarters of the total attributable to all EC 

 members. The total figure for those three in 1988 (using 

 constant 1982 dollars) is just over $49 billion (closer to 



