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China is building up its global competitiveness in knowledge-intensive sectors and its ambition to be a global leader in science and innovation by 2050 seems well within reach. China outperforms the European Union in terms of expenditure on research and development as a share of its GDP, and already produces about the same number of scientific publications, and more PhDs in natural sciences and engineering, than the United States. China aspires to produce and capitalise on home-grown scientific talent, but its growth model for science still involves sending out its increasingly better locally-trained scholars to the best institutes in the world and reaping the benefits when they return in the later stages of their careers, after they have fully developed their capabilities and built their networks. The US remains the favoured destination for Chinese students, which has led to the creation of US-Chinese science and technology networks and connections that are mutually beneficial: enabling China to catch up and helping the US to keep its position at the science frontier. The EU has much less-developed scientific connections to China than the US. The EU should take steps to engage more with China if it is not to miss out in the future multipolar science and technology world.

[Highlights] There is a significant divide between the European Union countries with the greatest capacity to innovate, and those with the least capacity to innovate. The difficult convergence process has been proceeding only very slowly and unevenly, and more recently seems to have come to a halt. For footnotes and references, see the PDF version of this paper. A particular weak spot for the EU is corporate investment in research; in this area, the intra-EU divide is growing. As the business sector is responsible for the persistent R&D intensity gap between the EU and the United States and Asia, the persistent failure of lagging EU countries to catch up in this area provides much of the explanation for the EU's weak performance compared to other economies. The evidence shows that the deployment of public budgets and the mix of policies employed by EU member states have tended to aggravate the intra-EU divide. The EU needs to better understand its growing internal innovation divide if it is to achieve its ambition of becoming a world innovation leader.

This working paper reviews the evidence on the impact of public R&D spending. The authors first look at the evidence from micro-analysis of the impact of public intervention on private R&D and innovation, with a focus on the latest results from crosscountry micro-research performed within SIMPATIC. To analyse the impact of public R&D on growth, the micro-results on private R&D investment effects are complemented with a macro-perspective. To this end, the authors look at how public R&D performs in affecting GDP growth and jobs in applied macro-models most commonly used in EU policy analysis. They focus particularly on the NEMESIS model in development within the SIMPATIC project. The authors conclude with some policy recommendations from the reviewed micro and macro SIMPATIC evidence for designing public R&D projects and programmes.

An important insight from the economic analysis of the effectiveness of public intervention for green innovations is the complementarity between policy instruments, indicating the need for an adequate policy mix of instruments rather than a focus on individual instruments. The evidence provides little support for the efficacy of single instruments, like subsidies, when used in isolation. For the EU, the biggest challenge for its green technology policy is the lack of a sufficiently high carbon price.

The European Union has prioritised the pursuit of innovation-based growth and targeting of resources to promote research and development, but performance on innovation remains weak. With the lack of results comes fatigue, waning interest and mounting criticism about policy. Should the EU abandon its ambition to become the most innovative region in the world? We examine EU member state research and innovation policies. We assess whether the deployment of innovation policy instruments in EU countries matches their innovation capacity performance relative to other EU countries. We find a relative homogeneity of policy mixes in EU countries, despite the fairly wide and stable differences in their innovation capacities. Our analysis therefore provides a rationale for a more comprehensive review of innovation policy mixes to assess their adequacy in addressing countryspecific innovation challenges.

This contribution focuses on the heterogeneity in innovation capacity within Europe across its different Member States. Who are the leading and who are the lagging EU countries? Is there a trend towards convergence over time? And how has the crisis affected this trend of convergence? We then take a look at the research and innovation policies which the EU countries have in place and try to assess whether these policies match with the heterogeneous EU countries' innovation capacity positions. We examine both the budgets allocated by EU Member States to R&I as well as the various kinds of R&I policy programmes being deployed. More particularly, we examine how heterogeneous the deployment of policy instruments is across EU member states and whether this matches with the heterogeneity in innovation capacity development among EU countries. Notwithstanding the large and increasing heterogeneity among EU countries in innovation capacity development, the evidence on innovation policies in EU countries shows a relative homogeneity of policy mixes in different countries. Current innovation policy mixes of instruments do not well reflect the countries' levels of innovation capacity development.

This contribution focuses on the heterogeneity in innovation capacity within Europe across its different Member State. Who are the leading and who are the lagging EU countries? Is there a trend towards convergence over time? And how has the crisis affected this trend of convergence? We then take a look at the research and innovation policies which the EU countries have in place and try to assess whether these policies match with the heterogeneous EU countries' innovation capacity positions. We examine both the budgets allocated by EU Member States to R&I as well as the various kinds of R&I policy programmes being deployed. More particularly, we examine how heterogeneous the deployment of policy instruments is across EU member states and whether this matches with the heterogeneity in innovation capacity development among EU countries. Notwithstanding the large and increasing heterogeneity among EU countries in innovation capacity development, the evidence on innovation policies in EU countries shows a relative homogeneity of policy mixes in different countries. Current innovation policy mixes of instruments do not well reflect the countries' levels of innovation capacity development.

In this contribution we describe how green policies should be designed to activate private innovation forces for ecological transitions. We look at the evidence on the current deployment of green policies and the current performance of the private green innovation machine. We try to assess how strong which types of government interventions have and can be to power the green innovation machine. An important insight from the economic analysis of the effectiveness of the public intervention for green innovations, is the complementarity between policy instruments, requiring an adequate policy mix of instruments, rather than a focus on individual instruments. The evidence provides little support for the efficacy of single instruments, like subsidies, when used in isolation. For the EU, this is perhaps the biggest challenge for its green technology policy: the lack of a sufficiently high carbon price. And as the evidence has shown that the world of green science and technologies is an emerging global, multipolar one, with many geographically dispersed sources in the various green scientific fields and technologies, coordination of green policies internationally should therefore be high on the policy agenda.

Innovation-lagging and fiscally weak countries in the European Union cut their public research and innovation (R&I) budgets during the crisis, while innovationleading and fiscally stronger countries forged ahead with public R&I spending. There is therefore an increasing research and innovation divide in Europe. The European Union, with its growing R&I resources managed by the European Commission can only partly redress this increasing divide. But the Commission has not used its powers to their full extent to allow member states in weak fiscal positions to maintain public R&I support. Furthermore, the application of fiscal rules has not taken R&I into consideration. Understanding the degree to which public R&I budgets in the EU have been used 'smartly' during the crisis and whether the European Commission has made 'smart' recommendations on public R&I as part of the European Semester, requires an assessment of the long-term impact on growth. Unfortunately, there have been few such assessment exercises. The European Commission should play a greater role in supporting member states in their consideration of public R&I for smart fiscal consolidation.

Highlights - Research and development spending has risen rapidly in Asia, particularly in China, which is now the world's second R&D spender behind the United States.The increase in Korean and Chinese patent applications has been even more rapid, but Chinese patenting for exploitation on the main markets for innovation(the European Union, Japan and the US) is still marginal. - Asia's increased innovation spending is most prominently related to information and communication technologies. Overall, the Chinese and Korean economies are still not specialised in knowledge-intensive goods and services.Furthermore, China in particular is not (so far) capturing much value from its role as a manufacturer and exporter of high-tech goods; China remains mostly an assembler of goods, the value of which is created elsewhere. - It would be wrong to ignore China's innovation potential on the basis of its current performance. Its clear innovation ambitions are likely to drive its future growth. - Europe is struggling much more than the US to retain its place at the global innovation table. The EU should use Asia's capacity building in innovation as an opportunity for value capture.

European Union policymakers have in principle put innovation at the heart of competitiveness, in particular in the Europe 2020 strategy. But in merger control, assessments of the innovation effects of mergers are inadequate, even though mergers and acquisitions can have a significant impact on the development of the structure of an industry, and on its capability to innovate. EU merger control rules include scope for assessing the innovation effects of mergers, but in practice, the European Commission's directorate-general for competition (DG COMP) is not 'walking the talk'. Innovation effects are only assessed when claimed by parties to a merger, and this happens rarely. Where innovation effects have been claimed, they have not been decisive in any case, meaning DG COMP has not considered them important enough to influence its decision. A framework should be put in place that makes the reporting of efficiency-related information by the merging parties mandatory, so that innovation effects can be properly assessed for all mergers. In addition, models can be used to make an assessment of the longer-term innovation effects of a merger, and to help inform decision-making.

Europe's failure to specialise in new ICT sectors and firms is likely to hold back Europe's post-crisis recovery. Europe lacks in particular leading platform providers, who are capturing most of the value in the new ICT ecosystem. In-depth analysis of some specific new emerging ICT sectors shows that the problem in Europe appears not to be so much in the generation of new ideas, but rather in bringing ideas successfully to market. Among the barriers are the lack of a single digital market, fragmented intellectual property regimes, lack of an entrepreneurial culture, limited access to risk capital and an absence of ICT clusters. The EU policy framework, particularly the Innovation Union and Digital Agenda EU 2020 Flagships, could better leverage the growth power for Europe of new ICT markets. The emphasis should move beyond providing support for infrastructure and research, to funding programmes for pre-commercial projects. But perhaps most important is dealing with the fragmentation in European digital markets.