According to FEDEA, the total expenditure on R&D grew 6% compared to 2016. Companies increased their expenditure on R&D by 8% and the public sector slightly more than 2%. These growth rates recall those of the years before the crisis but are still not sufficient for Spain to escape the small group of European countries who still have not recovered pre-crisis levels of R&D spending.
The Spanish economy invested a total of €14.052 billion in research and development (R&D) in 2017, the equivalent of 1.2% of the GDP, according to Spain’s National Statistics Institute. Although this percentage is 6% higher than the previous year, “Spain would take 180 years to reach the 3% target set by the European Commission’s Europe 2020 strategy,” says Xavier Ferràs, Associate Professor in the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences at ESADE.
Amazon will open a new research and development centre in Barcelona, where over 100 scientists and software engineers will work.
Spain needs to make a definite decision to bet on changing its productivity model which guarantees sustained growth and prosperity for the population. To do this, it also needs to make a clear bet on research and science.
Irrespective of what kind it is, research generates numerous commercial applications which can be profitable for the companies who promote them, while making countries more powerful and turning them into global scientific references. And so what about Spain? There is an increasingly more intense brain drain amongst young Spanish researchers. They are snatched by foreign universities to develop an activity which here in Spain is limited, fundamentally for budget reasons.
A recent European Commission report on innovation indicators highlights that Spain is the third country, along with Lithuania, which has fallen behind the most in matters of innovation – after Romania and Hungary. Since the start of the crisis in 2008, Spain has lost an average of 0.8% annually in R&D output.
BRUSSELS | By Alexandre Mato | Last year, the EU spent €275 billion on Research & Development, nearly 2% of its GDP. This is undoubtedly a huge amount of money, but not enough to compete with the United States, South Korea or Japan. Furthermore, a brief glance at the main tech and computer companies shows that the European horizon looks somewhat bleak.
WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo. In July the American GDP will go up, although the economy won’t even feel it. Nor the so-called sequester or the Fed massive debt purchases have anything to do with it. Oil prices and the dollar are also out of the equation. The key: R&D will be considered as an investment.