Understanding R&D Policy: Efficiency or Politics?
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[1] Universitat d'Alacant
Universitat d'Alacant
Alicante, España
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- Localización: Working papers = Documentos de trabajo: Serie AD, Nº. 17, 2011, págs. 1-29
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This paper searches for the determinants of government-funded R&D. The goal is to disentangle whether the efficiency considerations overwhelmingly emphasized by the theoretical literature are indeed the main driving force behind public R&D expenditures. Another goal of the paper is to assess whether other types of innovation policy such as the degree of patent protection can have an impact on private R&D. I find that there are important differences between rich and poor nations at this respect. In particular, R&D-specific efficiency factors are not significant to explain public R&D in rich nations, whereas related variables such as the access to private credit and knowledge spillovers are important in less developed economies; in rich countries, public innovation effort can be better explained by the political economy variables that determine the size of governments. Private R&D, on the other hand, depends in high income economies on R&D policies that try to improve R&D efficiency, but is highly determined by government size in less income nations. Results suggest that more research on political economy theories of innovation is essential to understand R&D investment.
