Relevance
Research and Development (R&D)
is defined as creative work undertaken on a systematic basis to increase the
stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the
use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.
R&D
statistics are compiled for four institutional sectors of performance: Business
Enterprise (BES), Government (GOV), Higher Education (HES), and Private
Non-Profit (PNP). In Malta, the PNP
sector is not captured as it is considered to be negligible and the BES sector
is, on the other hand, covered by Business Registers Unit within the NSO. GOV and HES are covered by the Public Finance
Unit and cover data
concerning Government Budget Appropriations or Outlays on R&D (GBARD).
GBARD
data measures government support to R&D activities, or, in other words, how
much priority Governments place on the public funding of R&D.
Data
collection and compilation is carried out in line with European Regulations
(EC) No. 995/2012 and drawn up in line with the Frascati Manual.
Methodological
description
For the Government
and Higher Education sectors, an annual questionnaire is compiled and sent to
all the Central Government Ministries and Departments, Extra Budgetary Units,
as well as Local Councils. Questionnaires
are sent by email either to the person directly responsible for R&D or to
the Director Corporate Services. Provisional
data is collected for year t-1 and final data is collected for year t-2.
Accuracy and reliability of data
Quality of data is ensured by
surveying the whole population rather than conducting a sample. Since the number of general government units
engaged in R&D activities is quite small, communicating with respondents is
made easier. Therefore, in case of
difficulties, the reporting entities are contacted and any issues involving the
data submitted are discussed and clarified.
To ensure consistency, the data is compared with previous years and any
major developments are also queried with the respective entity. If no contact with data providers can be
made, estimations are carried out using past data until actual data is
received.
Timeliness
and punctuality of data
Data for R&D for the Government and Higher
Education sectors for reference year n is
transmitted to Eurostat in two phases. Provisional data is provided to Eurostat after 6
months from end of the calendar year while final data is transmitted 18 months after end of calendar
year.
After
transmission of final R&D data to Eurostat, R&D data is published in a
news release. This news release is
published in July and illustrates R&D data of three reference years for the
three sectors; BES, GOV, and HES.
Accessibility
and clarity of data
The
‘Research and Development in Malta’ news release is published on the NSO’s
website as scheduled in the Advance Release Calendar.
Every year, after the completion of
R&D and GBARD data transmission to Eurostat, a quality report with the latest available information for
the reference year is compiled. A
separate metadata report is additionally made available on the NSO’s metadata website.
Coherence
and comparability/consistency of data
In
previous years, the compilation of GBARD data was done by reporting the figure
of total expenditure by socio-economic objective including all expenditure;
both government and foreign funds. From
2010, following the Eurostat grant on Innovation and R&D statistics
addressing GBAORD data, compilation of GBAORD started to exclude foreign
funding and reports only expenditure funded by the government. This arrangement has been applied backwards
until 2006. Moreover, from 2007, the
Public Finance Unit started including the amount of public funding towards
private enterprises engaged in EUREKA projects. As from 2010, data are
inclusive of public funding towards private enterprises under the National Research
and Innovation (R&I) programme.
No other
statistical domain collects R&D data for individual government departments
and entities. Comparisons between
R&D statistics and relevant statistics from other domains are relevant
mainly for the business enterprise sector, for which R&D statistics are
also collected through the Innovation Survey.
Data on
R&D for the general government sector are provided to the National Accounts
unit; hence perfect coherence with National Accounts data is expected.
R&D data for individual government
departments and entities is comparable from 2007 onwards.