Impact and complementarity of public support to business funded R&D: the importance of policy-mix and policy stability

摘要

Investment in R&D is established as an important factor to economic growth and governments aim to encourage the national level of R&D using different policy instruments. The purpose of this paper is to obtain new evidence about a fundamental question of empirical studies on innovation policy. Does public spending on R&D contributes to increase private finance to R&D, that is, it has an additionality effect, or alternatively it substitutes the private investment? This study contributes to this debate, analysing the impact of different forms of public funding to R&D on R&D performed and financed by the private sector. Doing so we add to previous research by exploring how the policy-mix and instability are likely to influence the effectiveness of the instruments. This work applies the Arellano-Bond difference GMM estimator to analyse the impact of public support as a stimulus to private funded R&D in 16 OECD countries over 27 years (1981 to 2008), being unique in this respect. After studying the results of a baseline model, we extend the analysis in order to explore successively, the existence of non-linear effects, the effects of the instability of the instruments over time, and the interaction between the various incentive instruments.