Best of the financial columnists

Spread the boffins thinner

Emma Duncan

The Times

Our top universities are “pretty extraordinary”, says Emma Duncan. Britain has 1% of the global population, but two of its top ten universities. Cambridge alone has 121 Nobel laureates, more than Germany or France. But if we have plenty of top universities, we’re short of second-rank ones, the kind that produce high-quality research and skilled, well-educated young people who boost productivity – and therefore prosperity. Part of the problem is that our “intellectual firepower” is, we’re boosting productivity in the most productive part of the country. We should copy Germany, which uses research funding as a “tool of development as well as of discovery” and has seen regional inequality decrease as a result. That £4bn (the sum needed to raise regional research funding up to the level of the southeast) should be used to create a few well-funded institutes. Fewer Nobel laureates in return for a “healthier spread of the funding that fertilises economic growth” would surely be worthwhile.