Latvia's Low R&D Employment: An EU Comparison

The number of researchers in the EU has increased in recent years: there were 2.15 million researchers (in full-time equivalents) employed in the EU in 2024, which marked an increase of 679 000 when compared with 2014. The number of researchers (FTE) increased strongly in Poland (+82.7%) and Cyprus (+81.2%). Moreover, it increased by more than 60% in Greece (70.1%), Hungary (68.7%), Portugal (68.2%), Sweden (63.9%) and in Belgium (60.7%) between 2014 and 2024. At the opposite end of the range, with the smallest growth rates were Baltic neighbours Latvia (15.8%) and Lithuania (17.7%). Indeed, Latvia has the third-smallest proportion of R&D workers in its workforce, with only 0.79% of the total workforce engaged in R&D activity. Only Romania and Cyprus have lower levels. In Lithuania the figure is 1%, while in Estonia it is 1.39%. The importance of R&D work in the modern economy is underlined by comparative data provided by Eurostat on non-EU countries. The number of researchers in China (excluding Hong Kong) reached 3.01 million in 2023. There was a rapid growth noted in China, where the number of researchers more than doubled compared with 2013. South Korea also recorded a rapid increase in the number of researchers (up overall by 52.3%) between 2013 and 2023. In the United States the growth rate was 38.3% (between 2013 and 2022). The number of researchers rose by 5.9% in Japan between 2013 and 2023. The number of researchers in Türkiye more than doubled during the period 2013-2023. The relative importance of the different R&D sectors varied considerably across the EU countries, with the business sector accounting for three-fifths or more of all researchers in Sweden, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and Finland. By contrast, the countries with the highest share of researchers working in the government sector were Romania (30.4%), Bulgaria (27.5%), Croatia (23%) and Luxembourg (22.1%). A majority of researchers working in Latvia (53.6%), Lithuania (52.5%) and Croatia (50.8%) were employed within the higher education sector, showing the degree to which R&D remains a largely academic endeavour in Latvia. In terms of its number of researchers, the private non-profit sector was the smallest in all EU countries, its highest share (10.4% of all researchers) was recorded in Cyprus, while the next highest shares were in Italy (2.9%) and Germany (2.4%). In the remaining 21 countries for which the data for this sector are available, it ranged between 0.0% and 1.9%. But there is at least one area in which Latvia is among the leaders in the R&D field: sex. While men accounted for approximately two-thirds (65.7%) of the EU's researchers in 2023 (expressed in head count), the share of women in the total number of researchers was close to parity in Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania, all above 45%. The gender gap was the largest in Czechia, Hungary and Germany where women made up less than 30% of all researchers.