[biohazard2]

Yep, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

> The Confederation made compulsory contributions of CHF 724 million to the European Union from the launch of Horizon 2020 to the end of 2017 [...]. According to the most recent official data from the European Commission (as at 6 March 2018), between 2014 and 2017 Swiss institutions received a total of CHF 654 million from the EU (not including Euratom and ITER). This means that Switzerland’s payments to the EU to date are CHF 70 million higher than the amount researchers in Switzerland have received in funding from Europe.

https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/sbfi/en/home/news/medienmitteilung...

[pergadad]

This ignores that the calculation of this is really difficult. It's not 1 contract = 1 country, rather it's often consortia of dozens of institutions. One of these is coordinating and that will usually for various reasons be one based in an EU country. In many of the cases the complexity will be so high that it's difficult to say which institution/country gets the biggest share. But this might pay for conferences, travel cost and service contracts and other things that others benefit from too. In addition part of the funds will also cover the programme overhead. Swiss staff will be seconded to (and paid by) the EU. Etc etc etc.

Finally it's not all about the funds. Participation in this kind of calls bring prestige, partnerships, postdoc positions, etc.

Plain and simple Switzerland benefits significantly from being part, as do all other countries.