In the past decade, EU research policy has become more central to the EU's political ambitions and its instruments are expanding in scale and scope. Recently there has been mounting apprehension over the EU's R&D efforts, such as the Framework Programmes, and their adequacies in meeting European...

This article investigates whether sector-specific research and development (R&D) specialisation indices are a useful device for R&D policy analysis. We first conceptualise R&D specialisation, and then discuss the usability and limitations of a quantitative benchmarking approach by displaying...