تأثیر بحران اقتصادی بر تحقیقات عمومی: سیاست های بودجه اسپانیایی و سازمان های تحقیقاتی  The effects of the economic crisis on public research: Spanish budgetary policies and research organizations

1. Introduction The recent financial crisis has become an economic downturn that has significantly affected private investment in Research and Development (R&D). At the same time, in most countries it has also been transformed into a fiscal and public debt crisis leading to changes in budgets and regulations affecting R&D policies and impacting on the public research sector. Despite some worldwide trends, there is evidence that the slowdown and recession are affecting countries and R&D and innovation systems in very different ways. In Southern and Eastern European countries the economic crisis has hit hardest and the negative impact of the crisis on the R&D systems has been more serious. The crisis has prompted a change in spending priorities together with a change in citizens’ preferences regarding public expenditure. In recent years, academic journals such as Science and Nature, and even European newspapers, have regularly reported the negative trends in research and science in these countries highlighting the existence of “budget cuts” 1 , “shutdown of research institutions” 2 , “financial collapse of research centres” 3 , “brain drain dynamics” 4 , “loss of trust”, etc. The lagged effect of past R&D investment and the impact of budget cuts on R&D funds, have allowed governments in many countries to assert that output indicators are positive. However, it is becoming evident that despite several years of convergence dynamics among latecomer countries, the crisis has revealed structural deficits that are likely to widen the R&D gap and have negative long term consequences for those countries when recovery starts. Although the crisis appears in government discourses as an opportunity for reform in R&D policies and public sector research,5 real policy measures have tended to follow a homogeneous top-down approach determined by the Treasury and Financial Ministries, without much consideration of the specificities of the research policy area; they have focused on a core objective (the reduction of public expenditure) and a secondary one (the reduction of the political conflict and public salience of the issues at stake).