A country that does not invest in research is a country that gives up its future. One hundred directors of the scientific institutes of the National Research Council have written and signed a manifesto to save Italian research and to make citizens aware of the serious financial crisis that the institute is facing.
The drafting of the provisional budget for next year has revealed a deficit of about 100 million in covering all the expenses that the CNR has to bear: both those relating to the functioning of the institution and those relating to actual research. In particular, this deficit was determined following the realization of two events that represent a positive boost and new lifeblood to Italian research: on the one hand the stabilizations that will determine the hiring of over 1000 people and on the other the updating of the contracts of the CNR staff. It has been estimated that expenditure on personnel will absorb 98,7% of the funding that the State allocates each year to research institutions.
If we look at a comparison with other developed countries of the world, Italy has 5 researchers for every 1000 people, Spain has 6, the European average has 8, Germany has 9, France and Japan count 10. “It would be crazy to think that stabilizations were a bad thing in a country that is in shortage of researchers, but we need to know how to finance this research. The contractual stabilizations and updates are positive facts which should have been accompanied by a compensatory loan which, on the other hand, did not exist” explained Rino Falcone, director of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies. "The budget had to be presented in balance and so it was done, but we cannot fail to denounce the fact that having eroded resources from research is a serious fact", continues Falcone.
Meanwhile, the current Government continues to present a budget law for the next three years in which the funds for research have not been received. Any intervention that is made to allocate the 100 million for the CNR cannot be thought of as a patch that will solve the problem for 2019 because the stabilizations, the contractual changes are now a permanent fact and which must be considered for all the next budgets and therefore it must be implemented in the long term.
The economist Daniele Archibugi, director of the Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, underlined how public opinion must be made aware of what is happening and what the problems are. Above all, “it is good to remember that by now the competition in research has moved to an international level and for this we need tools to motivate researchers. It is to stimulate research and Italian researchers that it is necessary to increase the ordinary funding for the CNR must be increased”, continues Archibugi.
In fact, to ensure that the research center can present a balanced budget, the funds allocated were found among those that the various research institutes managed to find autonomously from year to year and which, therefore, in this emergency situation they are subtracted from the resources destined for research and recovered at a global, national and European level to be used to pay the expenses relating to the functioning of the CNR and salaries.
“We were alarmed by the fact that one might think that the funds for the functioning of the CNR could be taken away from research. This has never been used before. The state finances the CNR for 500 million through the state funding fund (FOE) and in parallel to this, the various research institutes autonomously find around 52% of the FOE”, argued Rino Falcone.
The president of the CNR Massimo Inguscio affirmed the need at the moment to make reversible and irreversible cuts to recover the resources that the institution needs: "We have launched a work of divestment of buildings that the CNR does not use or misuse, but reluctantly also a cut in the tenders relating to internationalization, which will certainly have to be recovered”. However, despite the fact that this is an emergency context, it is frightening to think that the first cuts that a research institute is willing to resort to are international ones and in comparison with other excellences at European and world level.
Lorenzo Castellani, LUISS research fellow, says: "One way to support research is to participate in international tenders and this happens above all for the new academic generation who have been forced to study, write and approach the English language and cannot nothing but continue more and more in this verse. The ideal would be to have a system that pushes us to do this both in terms of resources and organization and this is hard to happen above all because of politics”.
The press conference was preceded by a moment that was intended to represent an act of civic commitment, of openness towards progress, i.e. the donation of blood at a specially prepared AVIS station. Society must be informed, otherwise it is research that will not grow, nor the economy, nor the future. Donating blood is a necessary investment to save lives and to show that we believe in others and in our future. In the same way, funding scientific research in the right proportions means believing in the civil, economic and strategic development of our society. A second moment was dedicated to the parade of the directors of the institutes who will risk seeing their research funds cut, who presented some symbolic objects of their research.
The response of the institutions for now has been institutional. An event to celebrate the ninety-fifth anniversary of the center will take place at the CNR on 21 November: the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the Minister of Education, University and Research Marco Bussetti and the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella are expected . From the Quirinale, according to what was stated by Rino Falcone, it was announced that the head of state has read the letter and takes it into full consideration.
