Research performance determined by level of institutional funding.

What is it about?

R & D data suffer from severe cross-country comparability problems, and therefore we propose to focus instead on the relation between change in input and change in output as these variables are independent of structural and organisational differences between countries. We define efficiency in terms of producing 10 % top cited papers, so it is an indicator reflecting quality. Our findings suggest that while input changes to a large extent (70 %) determine the changes in output after a lag of two years, some 30 % of the variation in efficiency needs still to be explained by other factors. Which factors? We take into account those factors that dominate research policy discussions: 1) the share of competitive (project) funding; 2) the role of performance based research funding; 3) the degree of autonomy of universities, and 4) academic freedom. Our main finding is that competition for resources is not a road to improve efficiency and quality, despite the firm belief in this which has guided science policy in Europe over the last decades (Senker et al. 2000, Lepori et al. 2007). Competitiveness understood as the prevalence of project funding in a country seems negatively correlated to the production of high quality output. Instead, countries with a high level of institutional funding, so called direct or block grant funding, tend in our data to be perform better.

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Why is it important?

Research policies in most countries are nowadays turned towards competition for project resources. We show that this is maybe a dead end street for research performance. Instead, our investigation suggests that trust in the profession might be a better way to good exchange for input of resources. Competition leads only to more of the same (mainstream ) research.

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