terça-feira, junho 14, 2011

Manifesto pela ciência

O manifesto pela ciência é uma excelente iniciativa de investigadores e de empresários, nesta altura de mudança governativa. A avaliar pela miséria que foi a política científica do último governo PSD-CDS, não se esperam grandes anos para a ciência. É uma pena, porque foi apostando na ciência que muitos países saíram de crises profundas. Um dos casos de estudo é a Finlândia. Leia-se aqui um relatório da UE que descreve o sucesso das medidas adoptadas pela Finlândia para sair da crise profunda em que mergulharam no início dos anos 90. Eis um breve extracto:

"In the early 1990s, an economic crisis struck Finland. Until then, Finland had traditionally depended on the Soviet Union for up to a third of its exports. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, as much as 25% of Finland’s export trade contracts became irrelevant virtually overnight. What followed was the deepest economic recession experienced by any European market economy since the second World War, as Finland’s unemployment rate rose from around 3-4% to nearly 20% within the space of a few months. At the same time, Finland’s foreign debt was virtually exploding.

The depth of the economic crisis in the early 1990s helped create a general national sense of urgency, which helped further bolster the role of science and technology policy in Finnish economic policy. By the early 1990s, the importance of technological development for societal and economic development had become widely accepted. There was a strong consensus regarding this issue. Thus, in spite of deep cuts being made elsewhere, the funding for science and technology remained the same and even grew. Because of the widespread sense of urgency, there was little resistance to this policy, even though it largely had to be funded by reallocating funds from other purposes and, notably, from privatisation of governmentowned
companies, as the soaring rate of government debt did not permit funding through loans."
"Towards 3%: attainment of the Barcelona target", European Academies, Science Advisory Council

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