sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: REUTERS/JOHANNA GERON1044 5 JUNE 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6495T
he European Union wants a massive
dose of research spending to lift it out
of what could be the worst recession
in its history. Last week, as part of a
€1.85 trillion budget and pandemic
recovery proposal, the European Com-
mission, the EU executive arm, unveiled plans
to pump €94.4 billion into research over
7 years, nearly €11 billion more than origi-
nally planned for the program, called Ho-
rizon Europe. But not everyone thinks the
money is the best medicine.
The Commission says R&D spending
will drive productivity, employment, and
competitiveness. Based on its own mod-
els, it has estimated that Horizon 2020, the
€80 billion predecessor to Horizon Europe,
will ultimately create up to 179,000 jobs and
add €400 billion to €600 billion to gross do-
mestic product (GDP) by 2030. Likewise, the
new infusion “will ensure that we come out
stronger from this crisis,” said EU research
commissioner Mariya Gabriel in a statement.
But Julia Lane, an economist at New
York University who studies the effects of
R&D spending, says Europe is not tracking
the data needed to justify its predictions
and, in any case, its numbers aren’t cred-
ible. If the return on R&D investment for
GDP is that good, “why don’t they just shut
the entire economy down and move it into
that?” she asks. “Just on the face of it, it’s a
ludicrous number.”
The Horizon Europe budget still has to
be negotiated with national governments.But the Commission wants €13.5 billion of
the research money to be spent fast, within
4 years, on projects in four broad categories:
health; climate, energy, and mobility; digital,
industry, and space; and the new European
Innovation Council (EIC). The Commission
will define specific topics and call for grant
proposals from researchers; it will also con-
sider making equity investments in startups
through EIC (Science, 10 April, p. 120).
In the short term, research to curtail
the pandemic will do the most to help the
economy, says Thomas Estermann, head of
funding policy at the European University As-
sociation, a lobby group. “Each week of con-
finement and lockdown has a tremendous
economic impact,” he says. “The solution to
the crisis will clearly come from research.”
The money won’t be available until January
2021, however, and only a tiny portion of the
€13.5 billion is likely to fund COVID-19 treat-
ments or vaccines.
In the long term, the value of R&D spend-
ing is plain to everyone, says Robert-Jan
Smits, president of the Eindhoven University
of Technology and former head of the Com-
mission’s research policy department. “If I
ask a person here in the streets, ‘What are the
sources that bring us prosperity and wealth?’
he or she will say, ‘education and technol-
ogy,’” he says. “It’s not even rocket science.”
While at the Commission, Smits brought
in economists to develop one of the models
that predicts economic outcomes based on
historical data. The model, called NEMESIS,
“can calculate for each investment, each euro
that you invest in science and innovation atEU level, what will be the impact—even on
jobs, even on growth,” he says.
But without detailed accounting from re-
search centers, it is impossible to make rea-
sonable estimates of job creation, says Lane,
who in a former role at the U.S. National Sci-
ence Foundation helped develop metrics to
track job creation from the Obama adminis-
tration’s 2009 stimulus package, which put
billions into research. She says setting up the
infrastructure to do that in the United States
took years.
According to Lane, the U.S. data show
some impact: For example, researchers are
more likely to found successful startups,
which contribute disproportionately to job
creation and productivity. But more than
10 years later it still isn’t clear what kinds of
science funding work best, she says. Europe,
meanwhile, has “wasted the last 10 years” by
failing to set up similar procedures, she says.
Smits agrees that tracking the immediate
impact of research investment is “a bit com-
plex.” But he argues that identifying longer
term impacts in models is “doable,” because
NEMESIS, unlike conventional models, fac-
tors in R&D spending. “I find it just com-
pletely bizarre that people still work in the
finance ministries with models which are not
giving any recognition to key technologies,
which are changing our lives on a daily ba-
sis,” Smits says.
Hans-Olaf Henkel, a former member of the
European Parliament and former president
of the Leibniz Association, an association of
German research institutes, objects to the
Commission’s top-down approach to stimu-
lating the economy. “Any kind of centralized
Brussels program, in my view, is doomed
to fail,” he says. He argues politicians don’t
know what kind of science is most likely to
succeed, and should therefore concentrate on
bottom-up funding. “They should let the sci-
entists do their creative work and not come
up with political goals.” The €13 billion Euro-
pean Research Council, one of the few parts
of Horizon 2020 that focuses on bottom-up
funding and is meant to be immune from
political interference, was originally slated
to get a €3.6 billion rise in Horizon Europe,
but the reallocation of money under the new
budget puts that figure in doubt.
Regardless of how the new budget shakes
out, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, an economic geo-
grapher at the London School of Economics,
points out that EU grants are “a drop in the
sea.” Most R&D funding in Europe comes
from the private sector, and most of the rest
comes from national governments, not the
European Union. “The capacity of the EU in-
stitutions to shape the way research is done
in Europe is limited,” he says. jNicholas Wallace is a journalist in Brussels.FUNDINGBy Nicholas WallaceEurope bets R&D spending will
bring jobs to battered economy
Horizon Europe gets ¤13.5 billion to spend fast, spur growth
European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen
has proposed a €1.85 trillion
budget that bets on science.Published by AAAS