European Union’s research and innovation performances under the impact of the economic crisis

The paper deals with the analysis of the R&D and innovation activities’ impact on the sustainable economic development. There are two approaches of this phenomenon: national and regional. The main objective of the paper is to quantify and measure the disparities between the Member States and to define their trend until 2020. The analysis in the paper is built on three steps: a regression under ANOVA table in order to establish the R&D and innovation disparities across EU28, a cluster analysis used to group the Member States into distinct clusters and a forecast of the gross domestic expenditure on R&D as % of GDP during 2014-2020. The whole analysis and all its results are supported by the latest official statistic data and pertinent tables and diagrams. The main conclusion of the paper is that EU28 is not the best competitor on the global R&D and innovation market. Moreover, there are great disparities between the Member States and European regions connected to their innovative capacities. And the forecast for 2020 is not a positive one.