Why Europe still hasn’t produced a Google

To get an idea of the economic mountain eurozone strugglers Greece and Portugal have to climb, consider this: per million inhabitants, they each filed fewer than eight applications with the European Patent Office in 2010.

Germany, with the advantages of scale that go with a population eight times bigger, lodged 335 patent applications per million residents. But the Czech Republic, of a similar size to Greece and Portugal, managed 16. Much-smaller Ireland lodged 112, according to calculations based on data on the European Patent Office website.

Figures on R&D are a little better. Greece spends just 0.6% of GDP on research&, the same as in 1999. Portugal’s research spend& rose to 1.66% of GDP in 2009 from 0.69% a decade earlier but still lags the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average, which rose over the same period to 2.33% from 2.16.