Nanoforum - Nanotech Regulatory Document Archive

1. Introduction
1.1. General information about R&D in the candidate countries
The European Union (EU) is preparing for enlargement by at least 10 candidate countries in
2004(see Figure 1). At the moment the R&D advance of the candidate countries are behind
the average of the current EU (see Table 1). The March 2002 Barcelona European Council
has set the objective to increase the average investment level in R&D activities from 1.9% of
GDP today to 3% of GDP by 2010. Two thirds of this investment level should be funded by
the private sector. (http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/era/3pct/ pdf/action- plan.pdf). It is
believed that research is one of the fields in which enlargement can offer the greatest
potential benefits - both to the Member States and to the candidate countries. (Science in
Slovenia, 2002).
Figure 1: Map of the candidate countries
(Source: http://forum.europa.eu.int/irc/dsis/candidate/info/data/candidatecountries/)
In fact, research is the first area where enlargement becomes reality. European
Commissioner Philippe Busquin and the responsible ministers from the EU´s candidate
countries signed an association agreement for the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) on
29 October 2002. For the first time the candidate countries received the same entitlements
as Member States. The financial contribution of the candidate countries to the FP6 budget
is based on their GDP ratio. As the Commission is interested in the candidate countries
being involved from the beginning of FP6, a reduction of 30% and 20% for the first two
years of participation was agreed.
At the end of October 2003, the European Research Commissioner Busquin met the
ministers and high level representatives of the 13 acceding and candidate countries again.
At that time, they discussed their participation in the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for
research 2002-2006 (FP6) and, more specifically, their response to the first calls for
proposals. From a total number of 106 000 participants in FP6 proposals received to date,
there are 13 450 participants from acceding/candidate countries (12.7% of the total). Of
those proposals that have been successfully funded there were 1500 organisations from
acceding/candidate countries (a success rate of 13%, while the corresponding rate for
7