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Heineken cancels SAB contract
EFSA sets July 2005 deadline on flavourings
EU R&D billions may be wasted
Business
Heineken
cancels SAB contract
Dutch brewer
Heineken has ended South African Breweries' licence to brew and sell
Heineken beer in South Africa.
The company says
“It is important for Heineken to have control of its brand in such a
large beer market as South Africa, where the premium segment is expected
to grow in the coming years. Taking full control will enable Heineken to
grow the brand's volume and market share over time.”
Heineken
is building up a sales and distribution network and expects to have these
ready within weeks. SAB will continue to sell and distribute Heineken beer
until the end of April 2003.
Food safety
EFSA sets
July 2005 deadline on flavourings
The European food and beverage
sector has until July 2005 to comply with a “positive” list of
permitted flavours to be drawn up by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
EFSA executive director Geoffrey
Podger, has given the green light to a landmark contract to evaluate up to
800 flavouring substances between 2003 and 2005.
The Institute of Food Safety and
Nutrition at the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration will evalute
the flavours, under the guidance of EFSA´s scientific panel on Additives,
Flavourings, Processing Aids and Materials in Contact with Food.
The results will be a positive
list of permitted flavourings, and a FLAVIS database containing all the
scientific information which was used for the safety evaluation of the
flavouring substances.
EU members together presently have
some 2,700 permitted flavouring agents. The Register was adopted as
Commission Decision 1999/217/EC and amended by Commission Decision
2002/113/EC.
Research
EU R&D
billions may be wasted
The 17 billion euros that the European Commission will spend on research and development in the next four years may be largely wasted, if the conclusions of
a new report are correct.
The report, published this week, says it is the ability to use the results of research, rather than the raw knowledge, that determines successful countries.
The money might be better spent educating people, suggest the authors, Richard Kneller and Philip Andrew Stevens.
"A country's human capital, rather than the amount of research and development (R&D) an industry undertakes, is the key determinant of absorptive capacity," they say.
Kneller and Stevens asked why some countries are richer than others. They believe the cause is "dramatic" differences in the efficiency with which they are able to use available technology.
Funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the researchers looked at the economic performance of more than 80 countries over nearly 30 years. Education levels or human capital have a big effect on income levels via their effects on efficiency, they found.
Other factors include geography, social institutions, ethnic diversity and fiscal policy.
"Efficiency is lower in countries landlocked or near the equator. This suggests that physical distance and natural barriers to the transfer of knowledge remain important.
"Inefficiency tends to decrease with the quality of a country's social institutions as well as its degree of ethnic diversity. "Increases in the budget surplus are associated with lower levels of productive efficiency in the economy as a whole."
The findings also contradict the view that opening up to international trade reduces poverty.
"Openness to international trade may play a role alongside foreign direct investment in the international transfer of technology, but it does not seem to generate any additional reductions in inefficiency," they say.
Kneller and Stevens also explored the effect of differences in absorptive capacity - the ability of industries in different countries to adopt new technology - on efficiency in nine manufacturing industries in 12 OECD countries over 20 years.
"There is strong evidence that R&D contributes to the stock of 'frontier knowledge' within each industry," they say.
Because the position of the industry frontier is different in each country, their ability to use technology is different, and hence income levels are different.
They also suggest that physical distance from the source of new ideas is important.
This may explain the not-invented-here syndrome that slows the uptake of new ideas.
It may also corroborate findings by Harvard University's Michael Porter of the key role of geographic "clusters" of expertise in developing world-class companies.
The EC is spending billions to develop such clusters in the hope of emulating Silicon Valley's success in communications and information technology. The top 10 European clusters are in seven countries:
· Stockholm (S)
· Uusimaa (Suuralue) and Pohjois-Suomi (FIN)
· Noord-Brabant (NL)
· Ile-de-France (F)
· Bayern and Baden-Württemberg (D)
· Eastern and South-East region (UK)
· Comunidad de Madrid (E).
Who spends what
Recent figures published by the EC show that Finland has the highest growth in R&D investment at 13.5 percent, while most of Sweden's R&D funding coming from the private sector. At 75.1 percent, the figure for Sweden is only 0.2 below that of the US.
Sweden and Finland both invest more venture capital in seed companies and start-ups that the US, while Austria shows the greatest growth in this area by far - 127.8 percent
since 1995. Next comes Denmark at 84.4 percent.
On average, the higher education sector employs around one third of researchers in the EU, while half work in the private sector. But the percentage of private sector researchers in the US and Japan is much higher. Figures for this vary greatly across the EU, with Ireland and Austria at 64 percent and Portugal at 13 percent.
R&D intensity in the countries
wishing to join the EU is still below the EU average of 1.93 percent, but many are catching up, with Slovenia, at 1.51 percent, currently in line to match the EU average first.
Source:
Towards a European Research Area. Science, Technology and Innovation - key figures 2002.
Source:
Innovation Scoreboard 2002.
For
further information, contact Philip Andrew Stevens at the National
Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) on T
+44 (0)20-7222-7665 or E
philip.stevens@niesr.ac.uk
or Iain Stewart or Lesley Lilley at ESRC, on T
+44 (0)1793-413032/413119 or E
iain.stewart@esrc.ac.uk or lesley.lilley@esrc.ac.uk.
The
research project ‘The Role of Efficiency as an Explanation of
International Income Differences’ by Philip Andrew Stevens and
Richard Kneller was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC).
Dr
Philip Andrew Stevens is a Research Officer at the National Institute of
Economic and Social Research (NIESR); Dr Richard Kneller is a Research
Fellow in the School of Economics at the University of Nottingham.
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