Italy’s research and innovation (R&I) system has experienced little improvement in 2014. The economic crisis has continued, with a further fall of GDP in 2014 (-0.3%), after the decreasing by 1.9% in 2013 and 2.3% in 2012. The economic depression and austerity policies cutting public expenditure have been a major constraint on public and private R&D and innovation efforts. In 2012 total expenditure on R&D (GERD) was €20.5bn, with a 1.9% increase in real terms over 2011. Preliminary data for 2013 report a 2.9% fall in real terms over 2012; a further 1.9% fall in public R&D appropriations and a 1.4% increase in firms’ expenditure is expected by the Italian National Statistics Institute (ISTAT) for 2014. The gap with the EU averages is growing; as a share of GDP, in 2013 Italy’s R&D amounts to 1.25%, against a 2.02% level for the EU as a whole. Italy’s R&D per capita is €339, against €539 for the EU-28 average. Italy’s Europe2020 target is a R&D/GDP ratio of 1.53%; in order to reach this target Italy’s R&D should increase – assuming a constant GDP – by €4bn, an amount far from the resources made available by the current policies.

Innovation in firms – documented by the CIS 2012 survey, covering the period 2010-2012 – is limited, with one third of enterprises that have actually introduced at least a product or process innovation; their economic impact accounted for 16% only of 2012 turnover. Total expenditure for innovation was €24bn in 2012, 50% of which went to R&D. This amounts to €6,300 per employee, a value that is substantially lower than the €7,700 per employee spent for innovation in 2010.

Conversely, good news came from the analysis of the publication performance of Italy’s researchers documented by the ANVUR, the body in charge of the monitoring and evaluation of the research system, report on the university and research system (ANVUR 2014). Data show that Italy’s share of world scientific publication – based on the ISI Web of Science and SCIval Scopus databases – is 4.4% in the fields of ‘hard sciences’ and 1.9% in social sciences and humanities, with an increasing trend in both areas. Within "hard sciences", Italy is specialised in Mathematics and physics, Earth sciences, Health sciences, and in Decision sciences, Economics and finance and Psychology for social sciences and humanities. Citations of Italian articles are below those of the UK, but similar to those of Germany and higher than French ones. When we relate scientific output to R&D expenditure, Italy shows 3.88 publications per million R&D, as opposed to 2.33 in France, 1.78 in Germany, 4.14 in the UK. When only public R&D is considered, the values are 9.15 for Italy, 6.55 for France, 5.42 for Germany and 11.31 for the UK. The latter indicator has increased substantially over the previous five years for Italy, while it has declined for Germany and remained stable for the other countries. When productivity is measured in relation to the number of researchers, we find that Italy produced 0.54 articles per total researcher as opposed to 0.31 in France, 0.27 in Germany and 0.38 in the UK. It is remarkable that, in a context of falling public resources, the productivity of Italian researchers has continued to improve.