The European Science Foundation (ESF) is helping to set up a research community dedicated to studying the science and engineering (S and E) labour market.
The number of science graduates has been declining over most of Europe but there are no short-term solutions to reverse a trend that threatens the continent's longer term prosperity and competitiveness.
This established drain away from S and E taking place both at university level and afterwards among young researchers can only be reversed by better understanding of the forces and trends within the global S and E workforce and labour market as a whole.
To do this the ESF is helping set up a research community dedicated to studying the S and E labour market, kicking off with a recent exploratory workshop, 'The Labour Market for Scientists and Engineers'.
The workshop was unusually broad in its scope, aiming to identify how the S and E labour market has been changing and what impact this has on recruitment, motivation and work satisfaction, according to its co-convenor Andries de Grip.
De Grip said: 'We focused on both theoretical and empirical research covering various aspects of the labour markets for scientists and engineers.
'In order to include several perspectives on the S and E labour market, we brought together scholars of different disciplines such as labour economics, the economics of innovation, industrial organisation, and management sciences.' The workshop was divided into five sessions to cover: entering the labour market; human capital and careers; labour mobility; researcher performance; and research and development workers in industry.
The workshop kicked off on the labour market for scientists and engineers with a keynote presentation by Prof Richard Freeman, a leading economist from Harvard University in the US, on the globalisation of the labour market for scientists and engineers.
De Grip said: 'Freeman stated that policy makers do not seem to be fully aware of the fact that scientists and engineers are the key actors in innovation, and will therefore be crucial for the future competitiveness of developed countries, which is at risk in both the US and Europe.' The second session focused on the development of careers, using case studies from several countries.
This included a comparative study of the internal labour markets inside companies for scientists and engineers in France and the UK.
The third session dealt with core issues from a policy perspective, and the labour mobility of scientists and engineers, concluding with a key discussion about factors determining migration of science and engineering graduates within the 12 European Union member states.
The fourth session then went further by focusing more on the key factors affecting performance of scientists, and how these vary between region and gender.
Huge differences in the productivity of academic researchers in Belgium were revealed, as well as the effect of information technology on the publication gap between men and women in the US.
De Grip said: 'The final paper in this session dealt with the question to what extent academic entrepreneurship in the life sciences induces a brain drain from universities to the profit sector.' The last session then addressed questions relating to salary levels and motivation, for example whether job satisfaction can compensate for relatively low rates of pay within research and development.
The workshop concluded with a sense of the urgent need to address issues of motivation and recruitment in the S and E workforce, with discussions on future cooperation and follow ups, and crucially the proposal for an ESF Research Networking Programme on the subject.
Freeman also proposed to establish cooperation between the European researchers and the Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP) at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of which he is the director.
The workshop has been a good start for this cooperation because apart from Freeman two other SEWP researchers contributed to the workshop.
Furthermore, a selection of the papers presented in the workshop will be published in a special issue of 'Economics of Innovation and New Technology'.
The workshop, The Labour Market For Scientists And Engineers, was held in Maastricht, the Netherlands in May 2008.
