Re:Proton Technologies awarded €2M from the EU
by nbevans on Saturday March 09, 2019 @04:52AM
(#19345392)
Analyses of only the R&D budget is surely a biased interpretation of the statistics. To spell it out: If XYZ nation contributes 100bn and receives 10bn back to spend on R&D (because it has loads of high skilled workers / industry perhaps) and 20bn back to spend on everything else - that still makes it a net contributor to the tune of 70bn.
To find a stick to beat a dog in the EU budget is easy.
After looking closely at UK financial contributions to the EU, the conclusion of a London School of Economics study[1] summarises things quite more eloquently: "In assessing the UK contributions to the EU’s finances, there are interpretations which are reasonable and those which are ‘spun’ to make political points, even though they are – bluntly – an abuse of statistics. A normative judgement about whether what the UK’s contributes (however measured) to the EU budget could be better spent on other public projects or whether the ‘membership fee’ yields sufficient benefits to be justified is beyond the scope of this paper. But the evidence is clear that, although it is a net contributor to an extent comparable with several other Member States of a similar level of prosperity, the UK does not face an unfair share of the burden of the gross costs of paying for Europe."
[0] https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/eu-uk-fundi... (page 12)
[1] https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67030/1/Begg_EU%20budget.pdf