AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The focus of this project was set on public funding by the European Commission, and the highest authority in research funding was used - The European Commission Framework Programmes (specifically FP6 and FP7). Europe has an aging population and neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) are a predominant factor in the elderly. Based on that knowledge, we chose NDs as our case study. We chose to look at 10 different NDs, all from the same pool of funding within the EC. Five criteria were chosen, namely: mortality, morbidity (DALY), EC press releases, internet popularity and number of scientific publications. From these criteria, we set out to see which one had the most impact on the allocation of funds by the European Commission (EC). The data was gathered for each criterion using carefully selected databases and search engines. After the data was collected, each criterion and the respective funding data of the diseases was correlated, which showed that morbidity had the best correlation with funding by the EC (for the period 2002-2014) while internet popularity had the worst. Potentially, one explanation could be that morbidity has the largest direct impact on the workforce of the EU in general and hence the high funding to keep the workforce healthy. It was also observed that for some of the diseases the EC funds do not seem to be well-allocated according to their level of morbidity i.e. some diseases with high morbidity get relatively less funding for instance in the case of stroke, which has a similar amount of funding as Alzheimer’s. It was therefore suggested that the EC allocates funds both on current and future issues (Alzheimer’s is getting more funds due to Europe’s aging population).