Even if the domain of research funding and expenditures is probably the oldest and the most structured domain of S&T indicators, thanks to the methodological work developed at the OECD since the '60 around the Frascati manual, it remains that official R&D statistics does not provide sufficient information on public research funding and, especially, on the role played by different allocation mechanisms. Yet, indicators in this domain are crucial for policy analysis, since it is believed that the choice of different allocation mechanisms - for example between institutional funding and project funding - has a relevant impact on the research activity and productivity; moreover, quantitative indicators in this domain would provide an useful tools to analyse the evolution over time of research policies and to compare different countries.
For these reasons, in PRIME a number of project have been launched to develop indicators in this domain and to exploit them for policy analysis, these include the comparative analyisis of public project funding in Western European countries and the analysis of changing structure of public funding of research and higher education in Central and Eastern European Countries.

Comparative analysis of project funding
This experimental project has been launched in PRIME with the aim of producing quantiative indicators on the structure of public funding and, especially, project funding. Thus, it covers a domain where official R&D statistics hardly provides usable figures in a comparative perspective.

• Lepori B., van den Besselaar P., Dinges M., van der Meulen B., Potì B., Reale E., Slipersaeter S., Theves J., (2007), Comparing the Evolution of National Research Policies: what Patterns of Change?, Science and Public Policy Vol. 34, No. 6, pp. 372-388 (pdf).
• Slipersaeter S., Lepori B., Dinges M. (2007), The role of research councils. A comparison of the responses by research councils to science policy in three countries, Science and Public Policy 34 (6), 401-415 (pdf).
• Theves J., Lepori B., Larédo Ph. (2007), Changing patterns of public research funding in France, Science and Public Policy, Vol. 34, No. 6, pp. 389-399 (pdf).
• Potì B., Reale E. (2007), Changing Allocation Models for Public Research Funding: an Empirical Exploration based on Project Funding Data, Science and Public Policy, Vol. 34, No. 6, pp. 417-430 (pdf).
• Dinges M., Berger M., Freitsch R., Kaloudis A. (2007), Monitoring sector specialisation of public and private business research and development, Science and Public Policy, Vol. 34, No. 6, pp. 431-443 (pdf).

Analysis of public research funding in Central and Eastern European countries

This project aims to extend the current PRIME project on the analysis of public project funding to a number of Central and Eastern European countries, namely , the Czech Republic, Estonia and Poland. The main objective is to produce analyses of public funding systems in these countries and of their recent evolution supported by quantitative indicators, using methodologies similar to those applied for Western European countries in ENIP-funding; besides their interest for science policy analysis the follow-up of the current economic evolution of these countries, these results will then allow a more systematic comparison of project funding systems in these countries as an instrument for benchmarking and developing research and higher education policies; the project is also a contribution to the extension of the European Research Area (and ERA-related activities like S&T indicators production and benchmarking of national research policies) to CEECs.

Three countries reports have been published, while a special section of Science and Public Policy presenting the main projects results will be published late in 2009.