The number of people working in the field of research and development has increased in Hungary in the European Union since 2010:

last year, 42,000 people worked in the sector, twice as many as a decade earlier

– revealed the latest Eurostat research. There has also been significant growth during this time in Greece, Poland, the Netherlands, Malta and Cyprus. The number of researchers in a single community, Romania, has decreased, with 7 fewer working in science than a decade earlier.

In the light of the data, it is not at all surprising that the growth rate in Hungary in recent years was 1.13 percent of GDP in 2010, compared to 1.6 percent last year, which has been a credible value since 1990. With this result, Hungary is ahead of countries such as Spain and Italy, in addition to Poland or Slovakia.

This increase in R&D expenditure is mainly due to companies, including foreign-owned R&D centers in the manufacturing industry:

last year, corporate expenditures totaled HUF 589 billion after 185 billion in 2010, an increase almost threefold. As a result, the number of corporate research sites has increased 1.5 times in a decade, and neither universities nor public research institutes have been able to keep up.

However, despite the thirty-year record, the government’s commitment to increase R&D spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2020 has not been met, although it is true that it has reached this level in most countries. However, a much more ambitious goal floats on the horizon of domestic science policy, which would increase these resources to 3 percent of GDP by the end of the decade.

The importance of this commitment is shown by the fact that only the most highly developed countries in the European Union today, such as Sweden, Austria or Belgium, can boast of such spending.

To this end, higher education and public research institutes will have to close in the future, but there is still plenty of work to be done to strengthen the research and development of domestically owned companies. This was the aim of the reforms carried out in the sector in recent years, such as the radical transformation of the structure of research institutes and universities and the expansion of resources.