Public R&D support to enterprises in four R&D sectors: the mix of types of aid and policy agencies

We examine how the amount of public R&D support to enterprises in different R&D sectors is related to the mix of types of aid and policy agencies. The question we ask is whether this amount increases or decreases with the number of types of aid and policy agencies in each sector. We use panel data on the amount of support received by Norwegian enterprises in the following four R&D sectors: the higher education sector, the institute sector, the health trusts, and the industrial sector. GMM regressions show that the amount of support is positively related to the number of policy agencies in all four sectors, and positively related to the number of types of aid in the industrial sector (the relationship is non-significant in each of the other three sectors). The estimation results therefore indicate that the amount of public R&D support increases in one of the R&D sectors (the industrial sector) when enterprises benefit from an increasing number of different types of aid, and increases in all sectors when enterprises benefit from an increasing number of different policy agencies.

Tidsskrift

International Review of Applied Economics