Research and development (R&D) is currently a major challenge for a country’s growth. Since 2000 with the “Lisbon Strategy” and then in 2010 with the “Europe 2020” Strategy, the European Union (EU) has set an objective of devoting at least 3% of its GDP to R&D activities in order to remain competitive with countries such as the United States of America, which dedicates 2.7% to research in 2015 (2.0% for the EU). Around two thirds of all R&D is carried out by businesses, meaning that private research has a significant weighting within the national research effort. However, businesses are not the same from one country to another and certain business sectors are more favourable for conducting R&D than others. Therefore, the sectoral structure of a country’s economy has an impact on its overall research efforts. Thus, if France had the same economic structure as Germany with a greater industrial presence, while maintaining its sectoral levels of research dedication, the research effort by businesses would total 2.7% in that scenario, in comparison with the current level of 1.4%.

Furthermore, in addition to the R&D activities that it performs directly, the public sector also has an impact on R&D by businesses through public policies and the funding for such private research. France is the EU country with the highest level of expenditure (as a share of GDP) on public aid for R&D by businesses. However, these policies to support R&D are insufficient, on their own, to guarantee a high level of effort in research.