The financial statement 2018 shows that federal contributions are up by 2.4 per cent compared to the previous year, while other contributions have dropped significantly. The strong decrease is due to the one-off entry of the BRIDGE programme, which was co-funded with Innosuisse in 2017.
Even though the SNSF has approved more financial resources for research projects, research funding expenditure has risen only slightly. The reason is that most researchers request funding for several years and will use a large part of the funding only in the future. Therefore, the approved research funding for the years ahead is considerably higher than in the previous year. The annual result was better than budgeted because the immediately payable share of research funding was lower than anticipated. The loss of around CHF17 million will be offset by reserves.