r&d

The study released by the Council for Chemical Research and commissioned by 27 chemical companies, laboratories, and government agencies reveals the importance and benefits of increased private and public research and development investment for the sector. The study includes econometric, bibliometric and historical analyses of chemical research investment.

The Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy report indicates research and development investment in 2000 rose sharply by 9.3 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, increasing from $145.6 billion in 1999 to an estimated $162.7 billion in 2000. The increase reverses a five-year trend of slowing annual percentage increases in corporate R&D investment and approaches the high of a 10.2 percent annual increase set in 1995.

Findings of the report indicate that the gap results primarily from annually comparing two separate and distinct types of financial data—federal obligations and performer expenditures—that are not comparable.

The authors attempt to refine the understanding of external information flows through the construction of firm-specific measures of incoming spillovers and appropriability from survey data on Belgian manufacturing firms. Incoming spillovers measure the importance of publicly available information for the innovation process of the firm.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) report is a special update to its 1997 study of the impacts of federal R&D on the New England states. The report is one of several AAAS has done examining the impacts of federal research investments on states and regions.

The brief from the National Science Foundation shows research and development (R&D) expenditures remain heavily concentrated in a few states. The report also ranks the top ten states by individual component of R&D activity: industrial, federal and academic.

The report provides suggestions for an analytical framework to conduct the five-year assessment as well as an initial evaluation of the states research and development (R&D) support. The appendices include five case studies examining five of the larger R&D investments the state has made recently in the Maine Technology Institute, advanced engineered wood composites, biomedical research, aquaculture, and the small enterprise growth fund.

The study by Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research uses the pharmaceutical industry as a case study, and suggests that the economic return on publicly funded basic research is substantial but on a time dimension that may be greater than most state and local leaders are anticipating.

The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy report offers information on federal research activity and investment in each state. The 700-page on-line publication provides a level of detail for federal research and development in each state.

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus “additional” to private R&D spending, or does it
substitute for and tend to “crowd out” private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. The authors survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years.