Working Paper #2020-047
Inter-sectoral and international R&D spillovers
It has been well established in the literature that there are intra- and
inter-sectoral knowledge spillovers, national as well as cross-border,
that make the social rate of return to R&D exceed the private rate of
return. Taking such spillovers into account is essential to examine the
impact of R&D policies. This paper reviews the literature on
(international) R&D spillovers and the various ways that have been
proposed to measure such spillovers. Although distinctions have been
made between knowledge spillovers due to the public good nature of
knowledge on the one hand, and 'rent' or 'pecuniary' spillovers between
suppliers and buyers due to the incomplete translation of R&D-induced
quality improvements into the price of intermediates on the other hand,
this distinction is difficult to make empirically. The variety of
potential transmission channels and transmission effects - all with
their measurement problems, suggests calculating spillover matrices that
are sufficiently broad to capture their correlated effects. The paper
proceeds by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of different
spillover measures. It subsequently describes two matrices of
inter-sectoral and international spillover weights based on patent
citation data. It concludes with suggestions for future work.
- Keywords
-
- spillovers
- R&D policy
- innovation
- productivity
- patents
- JEL codes
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- O31
- O32
- O33
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Belderbos, R., & Mohnen, P. (2020). Inter-sectoral and international R&D spillovers (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2020-047). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=8661