Hungary spends less on R&D than its neighbours — but the fix is not a larger block grant.

Indoklás

HUN-REN is Hungary's public research network — by the network's own account, more than 5,000 employees including roughly 3,400 researchers, organised in 15 research institutions and two economic organisations.[^7] Basic research is the hardest case in the chapter, and the framework does not treat it the way it treats discretionary cultural grants. Basic research produces knowledge whose value is genuinely difficult for any single funder to appropriate, and a standing research network is not a concentrated-rent or narrow-patronage line. But the knowledge problem applies sharply to the direction of research funding: there is no neutral state answer to which research programmes deserve priority, and a centralised network with a block grant set by the ministry concentrates that research-priority-setting in one administrative point. Hungary's R&D intensity, at 1.39% of GDP (2022), sits below the EU-27 average of 2.22% and below the intensity of comparable central European economies — the gap is real, but the diagnosis the framework offers is not "the state block grant is too small."[^8] It is that research funding works better when it is competitive and plural — multiple funders, peer-reviewed competitive grants, university-based research, and private and philanthropic research finance — than when it is a single negotiated block transfer. A nominal freeze is the proportionate posture: it protects the existing research base and the livelihoods of 5,000-plus researchers and staff while applying real-terms discipline and signalling the structural direction — shift the marginal research forint toward competitive, peer-reviewed, plural funding and away from the negotiated block grant. This is not a cut to research; it is a recommendation about the architecture through which research is funded.