5  See Zamarro, G., C. Hitt and I. Mendez (2016) “When Students Don't Care: Reexamining International Differences in Achievement and Non-Cognitive Skills” EDRE Working Paper No. 2016-18. 14/18  The first papers to have evaluated this experience in Spain do not offer conclusive findings. And that underscores the challenge of adapting another country’s successful model to our circumstances.6 It is therefore important to conduct pilot programmes enabling us to determine which design is most suitable for us. Also, in addition to improving employee training, it is important that such training should be in an innovative environment. In this respect, investment in R+D activities in Spain is still very low in the public and private domains alike (0.8% and 1.4% of GDP, respectively, in 2016), which places Spain at levels 25% and 50% below the European average. As a result, the technological capital gap with the EU has continued to widen. Here several measures, among others, would be advisable: to evaluate the possibility of increasing the public funds allocated to the area of innovation; to change research promotion and career arrangements to facilitate the entry and development of new highpotential researchers; to restructure in their entirety public organisations that pursue innovation in order to harness synergies where they may be found; and to promote a sound evaluation system to determine the allocation of resources across centres.7 Business financing  6  See Bentolila, S., A. Cabrales and M. Jansen (2018): “Market insertion of youth: Evidence from Madrid”, Working Paper, forthcoming.
No one knew how large the losses would be and whether the reserve capital would suffice. Funding ran short. Because what financiers in the market would want to give loans to a bank that appears unsteady? And who would want money in an account in this bank? I am sure you will remember the pictures of the queues outside Northern Rock’s branches in the United Kingdom. To restore confidence, the state and the taxpayers in many countries had to inject capital and go in as owners of the banks. This would not have been necessary if the banks had held more capital when the dark storm clouds gathered in summer 2007. The Basel Committee has taken note of this. The current capital requirements are being raised substantially. If I may go into technical details, the new regulations require that the  BIS Review 159/2010  3  banks should have a Tier 1 capital corresponding to at least 6 per cent of their assets, or more correctly their risk-adjusted assets. The risk adjustment means that for each asset one recalculates the value, depending on whether the value of the asset can be regarded as certain. One sign of this might be, for instance, that the value of the asset has varied a lot. The higher risk an asset is believed to entail, the more capital needs to be allocated. At present, the minimum requirement for Tier 1 capital is only 4 per cent of the total riskweighted assets.