The Changing Rationale for European University Research Funding: Are There Negative Unintended Consequences?

By Aldo Geuna. 2001

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years there has been wide-ranging debate on the advantages and drawbacks of the rationale for resource allocation to university research. The post-World War II rationale for public support of science has been challenged by a more contractual-oriented vision of how to support research. The academic debate has provided a diverse set of descriptions and explanations with some views strongly supporting the contractual-oriented rationale and others critical of it.1 The debate transcends the academic circle, as illustrated by the large number of national government reports: for example, Commission Jacques Attali (1998) for France, House Committee on Science (1998) for the United States, and National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1997) for the United Kingdom.2 This article examines how changes in the rationale for science funding might influence the behavior of universities in European Union (EU) countries and the USA.3 The article begins by describing the changes in university research funding for a selected group of EU countries during the period 1981-1996 and goes on to analyze the contractual-oriented vision of university research funding and its consequences. The primary focus is on the negative unintended consequences of the new rationale. It is shown that the short-term efficiency gains resulting from the quasi-market incentive

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

Commercializing academic research: the quality of faculty patenting (2011, background): “The high correlation between the number of forward citations to EPO patents with patent value has been documented by Gambardella et al. (2008).”
Reward System Design and Group Creativity: An Experimental Investigation (2012, background): “Here, research teams and universities are becoming increasingly reliant on competitive grants for the funding of innovative projects (Geuna 2001).”
University Research Evaluation and Funding: An International Comparison (2003, methodology): “This leaves peer review, despite its shortcomings, as the main assessment method for macro-level research evaluations.7 It is 3 See e.g. Cooper and Otley (1998) El-Khawase and Massey (1996), Geuna (2001), Kogan (1998), Kushner (1996) and Whittington (1997).”
Comparing the evolution of national research policies: what patterns of change? (2007, background): “Concerning project funding, it is normally assumed that the share of project funding has increased at least since the beginning of the 1980s (Geuna, 2001; OECD, 2003).”
Public Policies to Support Basic Research: What Can the Rest of the World Learn from US Theory and Practice? (And What They Should Not Learn) (2001, background): “But, although the share of business firms in the funding of academic research has increased in most OECD countries over the past ten years, it generally remains below 10% and government funding remains predominant (Geuna, 1999).”
Channels, benefits and risks of public–private interactions for knowledge transfer: conceptual framework inspired by Latin America (2010, background): “See Geuna (2001), Lee (2000), Mendoza (2007), Meyer- Krahmer and Schmoch (1998) and Stephan and Everhart (1998).”