Dr. Sheila Gilheany:

There is another aspect to the contract with CERN. CERN tries to make sure every full member country gets something back. It aims for a return coefficient of 0.9 when it measures how much a country puts in against how much it gets out. As one might expect,Switzerland does very well simply because it is located there. If we look at smaller countries, similar to Ireland, such as Hungary and Portugal, they have a return ratio of 1.3 or 1.1. In some cases, they do better than larger countries such as the United Kingdom simply because they are smaller and agile. By comparison they are not putting in that much in the first place, but frequently they have niche businesses that are well suited to what is going on in CERN.