Scotland

About the region

Flag of Scotland The European Union embraces a diverse collection of lands and peoples, few more distinctive than the Scots and the country they inhabit. Scotland's population of 5.1 million is similar in size to Denmark's or Finland's. It has a landmass of nearly 8,000 sq km, more than one-third the total landmass of Great Britain. Scotland is proud of its achievement in business – academia collaboration, resulting also in several highly performing science and technology parks.

Scotland has a tradition of excellence in education. It has 13 universities (plus the Open University), 6 specialist higher education institutions and 43 further education colleges. Scotland was named by the Financial Times as the “UK Region of the Future”, it has also won separate awards, such as the “European Region with best FDI Strategy” as well as “European Region with Best Human Resources”.

It performs significantly better than many other countries in terms of higher education expenditure on R&D. In 2004, an equivalent of 0.65% of GDP was spent by HE, higher than the OECD (0.39%) and UK (0.40%) average, placing Scotland in the top quartile in OECD.