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Assembly's vision of knowledge based industry is failing

Having been away for the last few days, I have managed to catch up with the latest economic data released by the Office of National Statistics, most notably business R&D expenditure for Wales.

It shows that not only has Wales' performance hardly improved since 2004, but that the gap with the rest of the UK has actually widened i.e. R&D expenditure in Wales grew by 2.2% as opposed to 4.4% for the UK.

Remember, this is despite a quarter of a billion pounds being spent on innovation support under the Objective 1 programme in Wales in the last six years. What on earth is going on?

We seem to be squandering the opportunities (and funding) that we have been given to close the gap with other regions. Would this have something to do with the fact that very little of the Objective 1 money has actually gone to the private sector?

Given the fact that we now have a new 'science policy' that is not only four years late, but has been universally derided by eminent scientists, things are probably going to get worst befoe they get better.

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