Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-296"
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"en.20011002.13.2-296"2
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". – I would like to thank the rapporteur, Mr Rübig, for an excellent report and the House for a debate displaying quality and commitment.
However, differences in innovation performance between Member States are still significant. Countries such as Denmark and Finland, whose performance was already strong, continue to lead the field when measured by the innovation index, that is to say in terms of trends, not scoreboards alone. Greece and Spain are rapidly catching up with the EU average, while starting from a relatively low base. But change is important and positive. The four largest EU economies (France, Germany, the UK and Italy) are improving, but at rates below the EU average.
A number of lessons can be drawn from these results. The Union should: first, invest in education and training, as has been said here a few times; second, improve its performance in the high-tech sectors and promote entrepreneurship; third, help to step up business research and development by encouraging Member States to introduce or increase the necessary incentives; and finally, promote the use of technologies in all sectors of the economy, including public administrations.
I am pleased to see that several of these aspects are well covered by Mr Rübig’s report. I believe this report will help to generate a consensus on the way forward. This is necessary, as shown by the findings of the Innovation Scoreboard. The report expresses Europe’s wish to reduce the Union’s innovation deficit and achieve the goal set at Lisbon and, hence, does a great deal to help improve the EU’s overall competitiveness.
I hope that there will be an opportunity to come back to these issues in the Commission’s 2001 Competitiveness Report, which will be presented in a few weeks' time.
It is widely recognised that policies that foster innovation are an underlying determinant of economic growth. I am particularly happy to present to you today the very latest findings of the EU’s innovation policy performance, namely the 2001 Innovation Scoreboard, which was compiled as a follow-up to the report last year.
The 2001 European Innovation Scoreboard gives us a starting point for the Union’s strategy to enhance its overall competitiveness, by providing a common measure of a country's performance using 17 indicators. I would also like to say that I share the rapporteur’s opinion in underlining the importance of education and training, something that has been noted by other speakers. One indicator called for in the report was added to the scoreboard to cover lifelong learning.
EU performance in terms of growth and the standard of living relative to the US and Japan highlights the key challenges that the EU faces in enhancing its competitiveness. In the past twenty-five years, and apart from temporary cyclical fluctuations, the EU has not kept pace with the US in improving its standard of living. The gap is now wider than it was a quarter of a century ago. At the aggregate level, the gap in living standards can be attributed to two factors: two-thirds to the employment rate, which is lower, and one-third to productivity. I will focus on the productivity gap.
Until the mid-1990s, the productivity gap between the EU and the US narrowed steadily. In the second half of the 1990s, however, the rapid acceleration of productivity growth in the US again began to widen the gap. Until the early 1990s, capital-intensive industries spearheaded productivity growth. This changed in the mid-1990s, when research and innovation became the key determinants. The industries that achieved the greatest productivity gains during the late 1990s were predominantly research-intensive.
The overall strategy for boosting competitiveness requires us to better combine Union and Member State efforts to develop more effective policies to foster and support innovation. National innovation policies should be reinforced, developed, and take a more consistent approach across the EU. This is why we need a regular benchmarking exercise to measure and compare the performance of EU countries, identify key areas of weakness and strength, and enable ourselves to design and fine-tune innovation policies accordingly.
Taking the EU as a whole, we still lag behind the US and Japan on most indicators. We trail significantly in terms of private-sector investment in research and development. Rapid increases in business research and development in Japan and the US since 1994 have widened the gap with Europe alarmingly. US expenditure in this area is now 74% higher than in Europe.
Europe’s high-tech patenting activity is also too weak: US businesses apply for more high-technology patents in Europe than do European businesses. Japanese patenting in Europe is almost as strong as US patenting. This patenting imbalance is an area that requires urgent attention. At individual Member State level, the picture is different. I must say that, as regards many indicators, the best-performing EU countries are also world leaders, sometimes doing substantially better than the US and Japan.
I will give you some examples: the UK, Ireland and France, for example, are world-leading suppliers of science and engineering graduates; the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are ahead in home Internet access; Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden lead in public research and development; and Sweden is well ahead in business research and development expenditure."@en1
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