In 2020

Enterprises concentrated again the largest share of Research and Development (R&D) expenditure in the Autonomous Region of Madeira

With this release, the Regional Directorate of Statistics of Madeira updates the Science and Technology Time Series with data for 2020. It should also be noted that the series now includes information on innovation in enterprises, based on the main results obtained for the Autonomous Region of Madeira within the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), with reference to the period 2010-2012 / 2018-2020 (for most of the new indicators).

In the reference year, the share of research and development (R&D) expenditure in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the Autonomous Region of Madeira (ARM) was 0.51%, 0.07 percentage points (pp) above the share of 2019, a year in which this indicator stood at 0.44%. It should be noted that this is the highest value ever for this indicator, whose time series begins in 2010. When compared with other regions of the country, the data show that the two Autonomous Regions of Azores and Madeira and the region of Algarve have similar results in this metric, standing below the national average. In 2020, the expenditure on R&D in the Portuguese GDP was 1.62%, while the Autonomous Region of Azores, with 0.34% and the Algarve, with 0.49% had a percentage below the Autonomous Region of Madeira. Área Metropolitana de Lisboa (1.96%) and Norte (1.82%) appear as the regions with the best performance in this indicator. It is of note that all regions recorded an increase in this indicator.

The proportion of full-time equivalent R&D personnel in the active population, in 2020, was 4.1 for 1,000 active persons, representing a slight increase from the previous year (3.9 ‰). In turn, the ratio for researchers was 0.30%, the same value as the previous year.

In 2020, a total of 71 research units were active, in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, employing 558 people (in full-time equivalent), up by 23 over the previous year. Most of the personnel worked in Enterprises (39.6%), followed by Tertiary Education (36.4%) and in the Government (23.8%), where the Regional and Local Administrations are also included, and for the last Private Non-Profit Institutions (0.2%).

R&D expenditure amounted to 22.9 million euros, in 2020, up by 2.8% (22.3 million euros) from 2019. In the year of reference, the enterprises led the R&D activities in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, accounting for 44.8% of the total expenditure in those types of activities, followed by Tertiary Education (30.9%), the Government (24.1%) and the Private Non-Profit Institutions (0,2%). It should be underlined that since the beginning of the series it is the second consecutive year, the enterprises concentrate the largest share of R&D expenditure, instead of Tertiary Education (between 2003 and 2018).

In all years of the series with available data, the Government was the main source of financing R&D expenditure in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, concentrating almost half (48.7%) of the total in 2020, followed by the enterprises with 31.8%. The Government funding stood at 11.2 million euros, down by 9.2% from 2019.

In 2020, the scientific or technological area where more R&D expenditure was made in the Autonomous Region of Madeira was the engineering and technology sciences, something which happened for the second time. Between 2011 and 2019, the social sciences, humanities and arts stood out in relation to the other areas, which did not happen again in the year under review.

In fact, in 2020, expenditure on R&D in the engineering and technology scientific area was 3.2 million euros, followed by social sciences, humanities and the arts, with 2.7 million euros and natural sciences, with 2.4 million euros. It should also be noted that the first two areas recorded decreases compared to 2019 (-2.8% and -10.8%, by the same order), with the last one growing by 13.4% (the only scientific area that saw an increase).

In the 2018-2020 period, 42.6% of the enterprises headquartered in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, with 10 or more persons at work, had innovation activities, a percentage which stands below the country (48,0%) by 5.4 pp. These data indicate that both in the Region and in the country, innovation activities were expanded in relation to the previous triennium, whose values had been set at 33.5% and 32.4%, respectively. As for the innovation intensity of the Region’s enterprises - an indicator that corresponds to the percentage of total innovation expenditure in the turnover of enterprises that declared innovation expenditure - it stood at 1.6% in the 2018-2020 period, also 0.3 pp above the country (1.3%). However, it should be noted that the change of this indicator compared to 2016-2018 occurred in opposite directions, i.e., while at the national level an increase of 0.1 pp was recorded, in the ARM there was a reduction of 0.3 pp.  

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