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Last year, Romania spent 5.065 billion lei on research and development, the equivalent to 0.48% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INS), published on Monday.
At the end of 2019, 43,973 employees worked in the research-development activity, 1.7% fewer than in 2018, of whom 20,252 were women, namely 46.1%.
According to the quoted source, out of the over five billion lei spent for the four performance sectors of the research-development activity, approximately 4.71 billion lei were current expenses (93.2%), and 346.4 million lei capital expenditures (6.8%).
Structured by segments, in 2019, the expenditures on applied research accounted for 63.9% of the total expenditures for the research-development activity, registering a decrease by 0.8 percentage points, compared to the 2018 expenditures.
Also, the expenditures on basic research had a lower share in the total research and development expenditures, compared to 2018, namely 18.7% compared to 19.3%, while the share of expenditures on experimental development increased by 1.4 percentage points, from 16% to 17.4%.
By the funding sources of the total research and development expenditures, in 2019, those provided by enterprises had the highest share, respectively 52.6%, followed by public funds (including general university public funds), with 34.4 %.
The financing sources from abroad used in the research-development activity in Romania were mostly oriented towards the units in the business environment sector (45% of the sources from abroad), the governmental sector (37.7%) and the higher education sector (17.2%).
During the analyzed period, 18,249 people with doctoral and postdoctoral studies were involved in the research-development activity, of whom 8,986 women.
Depending on the hours actually worked, about 72% of the employees who carried out research and development activity in 2019 worked full time.
By categories of occupations, in 2019, researchers had a share of 61.8% in the total number of employees in research and development, with a staff of 27,168 employees, down by 303 employees, compared to 2018.
