László Fekete and Zsolt Boda published their paper “Knowledge Makers? The Role of European Governments and Large European Corporations in Knowledge Production and Dissemination” in Hungarian in Külgazdaság, 2011 (Vol. 55), Nos. 3–4.
The authors emphasized that knowledge matters are important in the official declarations of EU and European governments as well as in the mission statements of large European corporations. However, these public statements do not bring about the reorientation of the national R&D policy of the EU member states and the redeployment of the budgetary priorities of large corporations. Efforts towards building a knowledge-based economy and society continually fall short of what was agreed in Lisbon and Barcelona in the years 2000 and 2002. Despite a few EU member states’ impressive figures—for example, Sweden, Finland and Austria—public R&D expenditures have remained stagnant in the majority of EU member states. As a result of misguided economic and R&D policies, the gap between EU member states and their global competitors has widened further in the last decade.