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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Crespi G.A.; Tacsir E.; Vargas F. (UNU-MERIT) |
| Abstract: | Innovation is fundamental for economic catching-up and raising living standards. Evidence demonstrate a virtuous circle in which RD spending, innovation, productivity, and per capita income mutually reinforce each other and lead to long-term, sustained growth rates and may foster job creation. Previous evidence highlights that Latin America and the Caribbean LAC has great potential to benefit from investment and policies that foster innovation. However, one important limitation of previous research on innovation in LAC is the absence of harmonised and comparable indicators across the different countries. This seriously limits the possibility to infer policy conclusions that are not affected by country specificities with respect to data quality and coverage. Also, most of this research is focused on estimating firm level correlations without attempting to identify market failures or other limitations which harm innovation investment or which could guide policy. In this paper, a wide range of innovation indicators are analysed in order to describe the innovation behaviour of manufacturing firms in LAC using the Enterprise Survey ES database. Our objective is to understand the main characteristics of innovative firms in LAC and to gather new evidence with regard to the nature of the innovation process in the region. In this paper we apply a structural model based on Crepon, Duget and Mairesse 1998, to estimate the determinants of innovation RD and its impact on total factor productivity. We pay special attention to whether there is heterogeneity in the effects of investments in innovation on productivity and whether there is any evidence of spillovers that could guide policy design. We found strong evidence concerning the relationships between innovation input and output, and innovation output and productivity. We found that private returns to innovation depend on the type of innovation, being larger for product than process innovation. Furthermore, we found some evidence that spillovers are stronger in the case of product than process innovation. It was also found that innovation returns are higher for the most productive firms. This increasing relationship between returns and productivity is not consistent with an interpretation that financial constraints cause more harm to low productivity firms. However, it is consistent with alternative interpretations about the lack of innovation opportunities in the case of low productivity firms or that low private returns are the results of poor appropriability. |
| Keywords: | Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development; Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology; Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives; Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: General; |
| JEL: | O12 O14 O31 O33 O40 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:unumer:2014092&r=tid |
| By: | Aldieri, Luigi; Vinci, Concetto Paolo |
| Abstract: | This study contributes to existing literature on firms’ innovative activity examining the influence of both internal firms’ physical and R&D capital, and external national and international knowledge spillovers. The paper presents a cross national analysis of United States, Japan and Europe based upon a new dataset composed of 879 worldwide R&D-intensive manufacturing firms. The empirical results suggest that the effect of R&D capital stock on firms’ innovation output is always positive. The effects of international R&D spillovers are positive in Japan and USA and negative in European economic area, while the national R&D spillovers has the opposite impact |
| Keywords: | R&D spillovers; Innovation; Cross-national analysis |
| JEL: | C23 O33 O4 |
| Date: | 2015–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:62541&r=tid |
| By: | Heyen, Daniel |
| Abstract: | Technological innovation is a key strategy for tackling environmental problems. The required R&D expenditures however are substantial and fall on self-interested countries. Thus, the prospects of successful innovation critically depend on innovation incentives. This paper focuses on a specific mechanism for strategic distortions in this R&D game. In this mechanism, the outlook of future conflicts surrounding technology deployment directly impacts on the willingness to undertake R&D. Apart from free-riding, a different deployment conflict with distortive effects on innovation may occur: Low deployment costs and heterogeneous preferences might give rise to 'free-driving'. In this recently considered possibility (Weitzman 2012), the country with the highest preference for technology deployment, the free-driver, may dominate the deployment outcome to the detriment of others. The present paper develops a simple two stage model for analyzing how technology deployment conflicts, free-riding and free-driving, shape R&D incentives of two asymmetric countries. The framework gives rise to rich findings, underpinning the narrative that future deployment conflicts pull forward to the R&D stage. While the outlook of free-riding unambiguously weakens innovation incentives, the findings for free-driving are more complex, including the possibility of super-optimal R&D and incentives for counter-R&D. |
| Date: | 2015–03–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:awi:wpaper:0584&r=tid |