A protest was organised today that gathered scientists outside the Polish parliament to demand higher spending on Science and Education. It’s exceedingly rare to see scientists gather to protest anything¹, so that a few thousand people turned up in the middle of the day on a Wednesday is not that bad. The protest was organised by a group of researchers under the slogan ‘3% for science, 100% for Poland’ (3% dla nauki, 100% dla Polski). The three per cent refers to the goal of spending 3% of GDP on science². Poland, unfortunately, has a long history of skimping on its science expenditure. I wrote a blog post about it 11 years ago, and while the situation has improved, we are still far behind the European average, and far from what was promised by the then Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz (2% of GDP by 2020).

To illustrate the issue, a colleague created the following poster to bring to the demonstration:

It’s clear that Poland is well behind the global leaders, but also far below the EU average. The speakers urged Prime Minister Tusk and Minister of Finance Andrzej Domański to increase spending, and the audience enthusiastically joined the choir: “3% dla nauki, 100% dla Polski! 3% dla nauki, 100% dla Polski!…”

But what is actually meant by the 3%? And could Domański give us 3% of GDP if he really wanted to? In a letter in Nature³, the organisers write that “only 1.1% of the country’s domestic product (GDP) is spent on science and higher education”, whereas the numbers in the picture above refer to “Research and development expenditure” from Eurostat.

On the campaign webpage (which at the moment of writing seems to be down) the organisers link to a post on X by Piotr Sankowski, professor of Computer Science at Warsaw University, that shows spending on “Science and higher education” has fallen over the last 20 years, relative to GDP!⁴ This does seem to agree with data from Eurostat on higher education spending, but not including R&D. In the letter to Nature the authors write that “We are co-organizers of the ‘3% for science, 100% for Poland’ campaign, which strives for 3% of the nation’s GDP to be spent on R&I⁵, up from the current 1.4%, which includes private-sector spending. “

Now we are getting somewhere. If the 3% includes private-sector spending, how much does the government pay, and how far behind are we? Again, Eurostat is a treasure trove. In the graph below, we see that the government spends just around 0.5% of GDP on R&D, compared to 0.73% for Sweden and 0.71% for the EU average. We can also see that over the last ten years, spending in Poland has increased by 14% relative to GDP, whereas in Sweden, government spending on R&D has actually decreased by about the same fraction. It’s also worth noting that the science powerhouse, the USA, spends about the same fraction of its GDP on R&D as the EU.

The major difference is in private spending. One thing that is painfully clear to students or PhD students who want to continue their careers in research after their exams is that Poland is a country of manufacturing and sales organisations. There are very few companies doing any advanced research and development⁶. There are some startups (some quite successful), but apart from some medical companies that administer clinical trials from Poland, there are virtually no larger enterprises with substantial R&D in Poland. It’s from the graphs below that one can understand how Sweden and a few other countries can spend 3% of GDP on science while Poland does not.

I wholeheartedly support the motion that the government needs to increase spending on science and higher education, but reaching the 3% is a far harder task than persuading the minister of finance that, without proper funding, Polish scientists will continue to vote with their feet and pursue their careers abroad. What is needed is a change in both the mentality and the economic structure of the country⁷, and that can’t be done by a government never looking further than the next election. It’s a monumental task that ideally requires long-term planning and collaboration between all the major political and economic camps. At least we can hope that the protests instil at least some politicians with the bravery to actually think about a vision for the future, and maybe start taking a few steps in that direction. And since there is a relatively strong correlation between government spending on R&D and business spending, persuading Tusk to invest more in science could help tilt the field toward more private spending down the line.

1. In their role as scientists! We are people and participate in other protests, same as other members of society.
2. or Science and Education, or R&D, or R&I, or … it’s complicated.
3. Poland’s economy is thriving, but its science is dying, M. W. Górna, M. Tomza, A. Starosta & Ł. Okruszek, Nature 653, 1262 (2026), doi: 10.1038/d41586-026-01664-9
4. Sankowski comments: “So the budget for science and higher education has been falling for some time now, and will continue to do so until at least 2025 :/. I’ve looked through the last 21 budget bills, as well as the projections for next year, and compared the expenditure listed under the ‘science and higher education’ heading with GDP. The trend has always been downward.”
5. Is this the same as R&D? The number is similar enough, and I can’t find any data for R&I.
6. Although, not quite the desert as it was in 2007 when I moved here and realised that I would earn about 1000€ per month as an “adiunkt” (assistant professor). But there was nothing to be found.
7. Why Poland spends so much less than e.g. the Czech republic and Estonia is a legacy of the socialist time, the war and the fact that Poland was a country of farming, mining and heavy industry with little basic science. A nice article in Nature on the topic was published on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.