TABLE 7.5 – Number of Belgian co-publications with the ten countries publishing the most with Belgium 2003 2007 2011 2011/2003 (%) United States 9.95 11.74 13.04 31.15 France 9.49 11.65 12.87 35.59 United Kingdom 7.09 9.17 10.32 45.51 Germany 7.06 8.55 10.31 46.09 Netherlands 6.63 8.82 10.48 58.15 Italy 4.04 5.48 6.96 72.32 Spain 2.82 4.17 5.59 98.39 Switzerland 2.59 3.55 4.34 67.43 Canada 2.08 2.95 3.40 63.52 Sweden 2.02 2.42 2.87 42.10
Source: Scopus, Elsevier (2013). Note: Data are expressed in percentage of the total number of Belgian publications.
The Belgian share of world and EU-28 publication grew by approximately 10% between 2003 and 2011, second only in the reference countries to Ireland which displays an impressive growth of the share of world and EU-28 publications of around 60%. The growth in the EU-28 share of publications comes mostly from disciplines in the Biomedical Sciences, a domain where Belgium is also more specialised than the EU-27 average. From the analysis of the co-publication habits, it is noted that from amongst the reference countries Belgium is the most international in its publication, one out of two publications being co-authored by a foreign affiliated author. The foreign author is mostly affiliated to the US, Cana- da or another EU member or associated country.
7.7. Conclusion
REFERENCES
• Eurostat (2013), Database on Population, Population on 1 January • OECD (2013), Main Statistics on Science and Technology. Paris, OECD. • Scopus (2013), Elsevier, http://www.scopus.com/home.url
Labour market characteristics
of doctorate holders
Scientific research is not only driven by investments and technological innovations but also by re- searchers. For this reason there is a growing interest in the development of indicators to measure the hu- man potential in scientific research. An important category of researchers are those who are specifically trained to conduct scientific research. This scientific training is usually formalised by the awarding of a doctoral degree. Because doctorate holders are no longer exclusively predestined to an academic career, it is interesting to examine the career perspectives of this group of scientifically trained personnel. It is obvious that all university-level educational programmes have the objective to teach critical and scien- tific reasoning and that in research environments not only people with a doctoral degree are involved in research activities; however for this article we narrow our focus to those people that have obtained a doctoral degree.
In our search for a single factor that reflects the career paths of PhD graduates we have chosen to make use of the variable salary. Although this may seem to be a reductive approach, this variable never- theless allows us to capture underlying career developments. Throughout their careers people make all kind of decisions that could have a potential influence on the wages they earn. Not seldom do job advertisements mention the number of years of working experience required to fill in a vacancy. The higher the responsibility ascribed to a position or, in other words, the higher the job is positioned in the hierarchy within an organisation the higher the financial reward.
We elaborate this topic in seven sections by starting in section two with an overview of the theoret- ical background. We give a short introduction to the concepts we use to describe our subject and the different approaches to job mobility and salary we have found in existent literature. In the next section we give a presentation of the content and quality of the data set from which we drew our analyses. Section four introduces the reader to the labour market for doctorate holders. The question we try to answer here is the following, ‘what are the career opportunities for doctorate holders after they received their doctoral degree?’. In section five we set out the variables which are linked with salary and which may help us to explain why wages differ across a seemingly homogeneous group. In the final sections six and seven we free up some space for the shortcomings of the data set and we try to give a series of recommendations for policy makers.
Several studies have shown a positive correlation between the presence of a large share of workers that completed tertiary education and the inflow of foreign direct investments (European Commission, 2011; Nicoletti et al., 2003). A reasonable explanation for this relation is that when foreign companies develop strategic partnerships with local companies, knowledge sharing is a necessary step in the devel- opment of products for the local markets. This entails spill-over effects from the foreign-owned compa- ny to its local partner. In order to translate the knowledge stock from the foreign firm, a highly qualified workforce is needed to integrate the new product and process knowledge into the existing production schemes of the local enterprise. To put these words in a more conceptual framework one can state that the absorptive capacity of the local firm have to be sufficiently extensive to guarantee a flawless conver- sion of the new technological concepts of the foreign firm into the on-going business activities of the lo- cal firm. The exchange of new knowledge is conditional on the grounds that the recipient firm possesses a knowledge base that is capable of absorbing the new technological concepts. According to the insights