Innovation-lagging and fiscally weak countries in the European Union cut their public research and innovation (R&I) budgets during the crisis, while innovationleading and fiscally stronger countries forged ahead with public R&I spending. There is therefore an increasing research and innovation...

Within the last few decades, rising environmental concerns, particularly about global climate change, have forced policy-makers to act in an effort to mitigate further harm. Yet though greenhouse gas emissions and the wasteful use of natural resources are detrimental to the environment,...

The EU's stagnation on many innovation indicators led to a number of efforts to spur a turnaround. One of most visible projects has been the Horizon 2020 strategy, which devotes unprecedented levels of funding to the promotion of R&D and innovation. But does this strategy address the right...

Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe?s economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

[Highlights] There is a significant divide between the European Union countries with the greatest capacity to innovate, and those with the least capacity to innovate. The difficult convergence process has been proceeding only very slowly and unevenly, and more recently seems to have come to a...

China is building up its global competitiveness in knowledge-intensive sectors and its ambition to be a global leader in science and innovation by 2050 seems well within reach. China outperforms the European Union in terms of expenditure on research and development as a share of its GDP, and...

The literature on within-firm organizational change and productivity suggests that firms can make more efficient use of certain technologies if complementary forms of organization are adopted. This issue may be of even greater importance for the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement...

Transition economies that formerly were within the Soviet Union’s political and economic sphere had on the eve of the crisis much lower GDPs per capita than the EU15 or the United States, despite exhibiting higher growth. In part, increasing total-factor productivity (TFP), a ‘residual’...

Innovation in the European Union remains weak and there are relatively few signs of progress. In this policy contribution, Reinhilde Veugelers and Michele Cincera give evidence to show that compared to the US, the EU has fewer young firms among its leading innovators and the primary driver of...

The EU 2020 strategy relies on innovation as the core driver of economic dynamics. The present Forum discusses the strategies established by the European Commission and the member states for the intensifi cation of innovative activities. Analyses of often neglected aspects of innovation policy,...