The Lisbon Agenda was an ambitious EU plan to make Europe the worlds most dynamic knowledge based economy by 2010, and a core tenet was to increase R&D spending to 3% of GDP which the community then bizarrely decided to implement by cutting research budgets.
Fortunately Singapores politicians and administrators are not so short sighted, which may help account for the fact that Singapore already one of the worlds most dynamic knowledge based economies, a good enough reason for us to hold the World Nano-Economic Congress there once again next month.
Singapore has been looking closely at European models, and has successfully avoided the one in place in much of the continent which seems to involve burying your head in the sand and hoping for the best, and instead joined the Czech Republic in announcing a substantial increase in R&D funding with a doubling of its current $$1 billion a year (500 million euros) budget.
This aims to take Singapores R&D spending up to around 3% of GDP, along with other dynamic knowledge based economies such as Sweden and Finland.