The European Union’s framework programmes (FPs) for research, innovation and technological development intend to give researchers powerful tools that enable them to enhance European competitiveness, growth and knowledge generation (Reillon, 2017).
They are the world’s largest programmes for international research collaboration. Participation in the FPs is based on competitive grant applications. This implies that a distribution of funds based on the principle of ‘juste retour’ cannot be applied. Repeated reports point to the issue of underperformance bythe EU Member States (MSs) that joined the EU in 2004 (Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia), 2007 (Bulgaria, Romania) and 2013 (Croatia) – referred to as the EU13 (Fresco, 2015; MIRRIS, 2016; Harap, 2017; Ukrainski, 2018a; Özbolat, 2018) – when it comes to participating in the FPs.
Those MSs that entered the EU well ahead of 2004 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK) are referred to as the EU15. The EU13 began to participate in FP5 (1998–2002), so they already have more than twenty years of experience with FPs. It would be desirable to see the discrepancies in performance between the EU15 and the EU13 diminish as time passes, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is happening (Fresco, 2015; Makkonen, 2016).
The interim evaluation of Horizon 2020 (H2020) (European Commission, 2017a) suggests that the differences in the participation patterns between the EU13 and the EU15 still remain. It showsthat the share of funding allocated to the EU13 remains relatively low, reaching 4.4% (4.2% in FP7). The participation rate was 8.5 % (7.9 % in FP7), and the success rate was 11.1 % (18 % in FP7), compared to 14.4% for the EU15. EU13 countries have a much smaller share of project coordinators in signed contracts: 5.1% vs. 87.6%. The decreasing success rate, however, is a common feature of H2020 in general and affected almost all countries. The average success rate in H2020 was 15.3 % at the end of 2018.
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