European member state security forces, supported by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as Frontex, have pushed back around 40,000 refugees attempting to cross national borders during the pandemic, according to an investigation based on UN reports and records kept by NGOs. These actions have been linked to 2,000 migrant deaths, chiefly from boats taken back out to sea. For more than a decade, researchers, UN agencies and NGOs have documented these illegal pushbacks. Now the Europea...

The 2020 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard shows that the EU’s innovation performance continues to increase at a steady pace and that the EU has kept its innovation lead over the USA. The report was written by Hugo Hollanders, with contributions from UNU-MERIT researchers Nordine Es-Sadki, Iris Merkelbach and Aishe Khalilova. This year’s edition is the first since the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, resulting in a small negative effect on the innovation scor...

We often hear about plans to colonise Mars or return to the Moon, to be achieved in a seemingly distant future like 2030 or 2050. My visit to the 12th European Space Conference in Brussels on 21-22 January 2020 made me realise however that space is actually at the centre of strategic debates happening right now and that it offers many prospects for today’s policymakers. “From a geopolitical point of view, space is the new frontier of global politics,” said Josep Borrell, EU High Representative f...

This month I travelled from Maastricht to Bruges on the day that happened to be the hottest day ever recorded in both Dutch and Belgian meteorological history. As weather experts were explaining how a wave of hot air had moved north from the Sahara across continental Europe, it became clear to most European citizens that heat waves have no borders, with heat records also broken in neighbouring France and Germany. In Maastricht and Bruges, temperatures, as if they had harmonised, were ultimately ...

For many Europeans, mobility within the European Union is such an inherent part of everyday life that the availability of precise statistics on these movements may seem like a given. However, a new data-mapping exercise conducted as part of the REMINDER project has revealed that our understanding of intra-EU migration is still far from complete: even basic stock and flow statistics on internal European movements suffer from considerable shortcomings: existing data does not reveal who is moving, ...

Prof. Pierre Mohnen will lead UNU-MERIT’s stake in WATSON – a new 1 million euro innovation project funded by the European Commission. Part of the Horizon 2020 programme, WATSON is an 18-month project involving EU research institutions and SMEs working in Fintech, financial services and economics. We caught up with Pierre to find out more. What’s our role and who are the other partners? The WATSON project focuses on R&D tax incentives to promote innovation in Small and Medium-sized Ent...

Researcher Hugo Hollanders co-hosted the launch workshop of the new ‘European Observatory for Clusters and Industrial Change’ (EOCIC) on 22 January 2018. Held in Brussels, the workshop gathered around 40 participants including 10 invited experts, 18 representatives from the European Commission, plus consortium partners. This EC-funded project aims to help Europe’s regions and countries design better and more evidence-based cluster policies and initiatives. The observatory is designed to su...

The situation in Catalonia is critical, given that its drive for independence is opposed by the Spanish authorities. The Catalan government calls for dialogue - but the Spanish government makes it conditional on compliance with the Spanish constitutional and legal system. The commission refuses to interfere in this arguably domestic dispute, claiming a lack of a formal basis, and it stresses the need to fully respect the Spanish constitutional order and the rule of law....

Prof. Luc Soete will address an informal meeting of EU ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on 25 July 2017. Seeking to improve the coherence and openness of EU research and innovation partnerships, he joins speakers including Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, and Pascal Lamy, former Director-General of the World Trade Organization. The meeting will also consider the interim evaluation of Horizon 2020 and the future of European research and innovation funding. ...

Co-authored by researchers Hugo Hollanders  and Nordine Es-Sadki, the European Innovation Scoreboard gives a comparative analysis of innovation performance across EU member states, other European countries, and regional neighbours. According to this year’s results, EU innovation performance continues to increase, partly thanks to improvements in human resources, the innovation-friendly environment, own-resource investments, and attractive research systems. Overall, Sweden remains the EU in...