A 2026-os költségvetés-elemzésből
Who decides which firm's R&D idea is worth your money?
55 billion Ft a year flows through grant committees that score applications — not markets that test products. The committee allocates a rent; it cannot allocate innovation.
55,531 millió Ft — around 5,750 Ft per employed worker — disbursed annually by a council scoring grant applications rather than by firms investing in their own research.
Amit látsz — és amit nem
The seen: SMEs and universities receiving grants for declared R&D projects. The unseen: every firm paying the innovation contribution whose money returns to a different subset of firms — the ones that hired the best grant-writers — while Hungary still ranks below Czechia on every European innovation index.
Ellenvetés
"But small firms can't afford R&D without grants — the state has to bridge the gap."
Válasz
The gap exists partly because the levy itself taxes firms 0.3% of turnover before they can reinvest anything. The Estonian alternative retains R&D spending but removes the tax wedge: firms reinvesting their own earnings in research pay no corporate tax on those earnings at all, with no committee to satisfy. The grant route collects money, runs it through a council, and returns a portion to the best-connected applicants; the Estonian route leaves the money in the firm that earned it.
Share if you think firms should choose their own research investments — not apply to committees for permission.
Az elemző értékelése
Innovációs Alaprész
Az elemző indoklása jelenleg angol nyelven elérhető; magyar fordítás folyamatban.
Indoklás
This sub-fund runs competitive grant programmes that pay firms — disproportionately small and medium-sized enterprises — to undertake research and development, increasingly in cooperation with universities.[^2] The grant model places a political officeholder, or a council appointed by one, in the position of deciding which firms' R&D projects are worth public money. That decision cannot be made well. The value of a research project is whether it produces something a future buyer will pay for; that test is run by the market, through profit and loss, and it cannot be run in advance by a grant committee scoring applications. A committee can score the application's conformity to the call's stated priorities — but conformity to a state-set priority is precisely not the same thing as value to a future consumer. What the committee actually allocates is not "the optimal level of innovation" — there is no such observable quantity — but a rent: a sum that flows to the firm best at writing grant applications and aligning its stated R&D plans with the current call. A firm that learns to win calls has an incentive to keep doing so independently of whether the funded work yields anything; a professional grant-capture capability forms, and it lobbies for the programme's continuation regardless of output. The deeper point is visible in the international comparison. Hungary already spends heavily on state-financed R&D and gets thin results. Hungary's public R&D funding channels a larger share of gross R&D spending through government and fund mechanisms than the EU average, while private business R&D remains below the EU norm;[^6] on the European Innovation Scoreboard 2024 Hungary scores about 85% of the EU average and ranks among the moderate innovators, behind Czechia.[^3] Hungarian gross R&D spending was about 1.39% of GDP in 2023, against an EU average near 2.2% and Czechia's 1.83%.[^3] The pattern is a state that funds research generously through grant channels and a private sector that under-invests. The grant channel does not appear to be converting public money into private innovation capacity; if anything the availability of grant money substitutes for, rather than crowds in, firms' own research spending. The mechanism is the one Estonia's tax design avoids: where the state taxes corporate profit and then hands a portion back as discretionary grants, the firm's rational response is to optimise for the grant, not for the product. Estonia instead taxes corporate profit only when it is distributed — retained and reinvested earnings are untaxed — so a firm reinvesting in its own R&D faces no tax wedge on that decision at all and no grant committee to satisfy.[^4] The classification follows: a programme that collects a levy from firms and returns it to a subset of firms via a committee is a circular transfer with a calculation problem in the middle. The honest reform is to stop running the levy-and-grant loop and let firms keep and reinvest the money directly.
Átállási mechanizmus
A five-year phase-out, not an immediate cut, because firms have entered multi-year grant contracts in good faith and universities have built research staffing around cooperative-project funding. Year 1: no new calls opened; in-flight grant contracts honoured to term. Years 2-5: contracted commitments run off as projects complete; the contractual tail of typical 2-4 year R&D grants is exhausted by year 5. As the sub-fund winds down, the innovation contribution is cut in step — the levy and the grant programme are abolished together, not the grant programme alone, so the firms stop paying the levy at the same pace they stop receiving the grants. The reinvestment incentive is then delivered through the tax base rather than through a committee: the policy that replaces the Innovation Sub-fund is a move toward distributed-profits corporate taxation, on the Estonian model, where earnings a firm reinvests in research are not taxed at distribution.[^4] The bridge is funded by the levy run-off itself: as grant outlays fall, contribution revenue falls with them; there is no separate bridge cost beyond honouring signed contracts.
Érintett csoportok
SMEs currently winning innovation grants lose the grant income but stop paying the contribution and, under the replacement tax design, face no tax on reinvested R&D earnings. Universities running cooperative projects lose a funding stream over a five-year horizon and must replace it with contract research paid by firms directly, or with the research-grant route in the Kutatási Alaprész. Grant-administration staff at the managing agency are addressed under the managing-agency line below. The firms paying the contribution — the cost-bearers of the whole arrangement — gain: a 0.3% surtax on profit above the SME threshold falls away.
Források
- Csaknem 120 milliard forintbol indulhatnak uj palyazatok a Nemzeti Kutatasi, Fejlesztesi es Innovacios Alapbol 2026-ban · Nemzeti Kutatasi, Fejlesztesi es Innovacios Hivatal (NKFIH) (2025)
- Estonia corporate income tax · Estonian Tax and Customs Board (2024)
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