With its 80 institutes and more than 12,000 employees, the Max Planck Society needs an annual budget increase of 4% in order to maintain its competitiveness in research on an international level, explained MPG president Professor Peter Gruss at the assembly.
In a report on competitiveness and research released last year, the National Academies, the country's top science advisory body, urged the government to substantially expand spending on long-term basic research, particularly on energy.
Such a move could "decimate Britain's global competitiveness in research", Grant told the Guardian, arguing that there is a "direct human benefit" in areas such as cancer and Parkinson's disease from research-intensive universities.
"We collect few taxes because we have oil," said Juan E. Pardinas, the general director of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a research institute here.
"There will be more of these because the issue has taken off," said Ricardo Corona, a public finance expert at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a research group in Mexico City.
He said cutting research funding would "decimate Britain's global competitiveness in research".
The results showed that several Asian countries continued to outperform the United States greatly in science and math, subjects that are crucial to economic competitiveness and research.
Grant, provost of UCL – rated fourth best university in the world after Harvard, Cambridge and Yale – said: "The biggest risk to the big research universities is a cut in funding for research, if that was done without proper identification of excellence then it would decimate Britain's global competitiveness in research".
We can make up some of the shortfall by raising taxes, but if we bail out Social Security and Medicare without reforming them they will gobble up the money that should be invested in our crumbling infrastructure, our educational competitiveness, basic research, etc.
The president talks over and over about the need to invest in important areas of the economy — education to prepare the next generation, infrastructure to generate jobs and boost competitiveness, and research and development so that America remains the world's leading innovator.
Microsoft opened a research center in Germany yesterday that will work on projects earmarked by the European Commission to further the region's technological competitiveness.
