R&D Investment and Economic Development

This project explores how governments foster economic growth through encouraging business investment in research and development (R&D) by innovation policy actions. The conceptual framework is composed of two interrelated processes. One deals with how internal and external innovative outputs contribute to economic performance. The other process focuses on the impact of government innovation policies in stimulating business innovation efforts. As a major step in implementing the framework, two pieces of research have been completed. One of them examines the effectiveness of three major national innovation policies (patent protection, R&D tax incentives, and government R&D subsidies) on business performed and financed R&D. The other one is an across-state assessment on whether state level R&D tax incentives are effective in stimulating additional industrial R&D expenditure in U.S. states. The future research will explore policy-induced R&D investment and innovation-based economic development in a unified framework based on the existing datasets augmented by some additional economic development measurements.

PI: Dr. YongHong Wu