The 2019 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This fourteenth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 131 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2017 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The participating EU firms have a total of €64. billion of R&D investments, 31% of the total R&D investments by EU firms in the 2017 EU R&D Scoreboard, and expect R&D investment to increase by 4.6% per year in 2018 and 2019.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

Is Corporate R&D Investment in High-Tech Sectors More Effective? Some Guidelines for European Research Policy

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labour productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low-tech to the medium and high-tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high-tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low-tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low-tech sectors should support overall capital formation.innovation, industrial policy, R&D, productivity, high-tech sectors

The 2017 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This twelfth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 151 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2015 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 151 companies are responsible for €53.9 billion R&D investment, constituting almost one fourth of the total R&D investment by the 1000 EU Scoreboard companies.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

The Productivity Impact of R&D Investment: Evidence from European Microdata

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between a firm's R&D activities and its productivity using a unique micro data panel dataset and looking at sectoral peculiarities which may emerge; more specifically, we used an unbalanced longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the six-year period 2000-2005. Our main findings can be summarised along the following lines: knowledge stock has a significant positive impact on a firm's productivity, with an overall elasticity of about 0.125; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance and the estimated magnitude of the relevant coefficient. More interestingly, the coefficient increases monotonically when we move from the low-tech to the medium-high and high-tech sectors, ranging from a minimum of 0.05/0.07 to a maximum of 0.16/0.18. This outcome, in contrast with recently-renewed acceptance of low-tech sectors as a preferred target of R&D investment, suggests that firms in high-tech sectors are still far ahead in terms of the impact on productivity of their R&D investments, at least as regards top European R&D investors. JEL-classification: O33 Keywords: R&D, productivity, knowledge stock, panel data, perpetual inventory methodJRC.J.3-Knowledge for Growt

Corporate R&D and Firm Efficiency: Evidence from Europe’s Top R&D Investors

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firms' performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the period 2000–2005. R&D stocks are considered as pivotal input in order to control for their particular contribution to firm-level efficiency. Conceptually, the study quantifies the technical inefficiency of a given company and tests empirically whether R&D activities could explain the distance from the efficient boundary of the production possibility set, i.e. the production frontier. From a policy perspective, the results of this study suggest that – if the aim is to leverage companies' productivity – emphasis should be put on supporting corporate R&D in high-tech sectors and, to some extent, in medium-tech sectors. By contrast, supporting corporate R&D in the low-tech sector turns out to have a minor effect. Instead, encouraging investment in fixed assets appears vital for the productivity of low-tech industries. However, with regard to firms' technical efficiency, R&D matters for all industries (unlike capital intensity). Hence, the allocation of support for corporate R&D seems to be as important as its overall increase and an 'erga omnes' approach across all sectors appears inappropriate.corporate R&D, productivity, technical efficiency, stochastic frontier analysis

R&D and Productivity: Testing Sectoral Peculiarities Using Micro Data

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between a firm's R&D activities and its productivity using a unique micro data panel dataset and looking at sectoral peculiarities which may emerge; more specifically, we used an unbalanced longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the six-year period 2000-2005. Our main findings can be summarised along the following lines: knowledge stock has a significant positive impact on a firm's productivity, with an overall elasticity of about 0.125; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance and the estimated magnitude of the relevant coefficient. More interestingly, the coefficient increases monotonically when we move from the low-tech to the medium-high and high-tech sectors, ranging from a minimum of 0.05/0.07 to a maximum of 0.16/0.18. This outcome, in contrast with recently-renewed acceptance of low-tech sectors as a preferred target of R&D investment, suggests that firms in high-tech sectors are still far ahead in terms of the impact on productivity of their R&D investments, at least as regards top European R&D investors.perpetual inventory method, R&D, panel data, knowledge stock, productivity

The 2018 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This thirteenth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 148 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2017 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The participating EU firms have a total of €69.2 billion of R&D investments, 36% of the total R&D investments by EU firms in the 2017 EU R&D Scoreboard, and expect R&D investment to increase by 5.4% per year in 2018 and 2019.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

Analysis of the 2007 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard

This report offers an analysis of the European Commission¿s 2007 Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard). It contains information on the 1000 EU companies and 1000 non-EU companies which made the biggest investments in Research and Development (R&D) in the period. Together, these 2000 companies invested ¿372 billion in R&D in the year of reporting (i.e. 2006/7). This corresponds to approximately 80% of global business expenditure on R&D . The analysis describes the main trends in recent years and investigates the differences between EU companies and their competitors in terms of R&D intensity and R&D growth. It also includes results of further research on three related topics: i) To what extent is the EU-US gap in R&D intensity due to differences in the sectoral composition of sales?; ii) Does low corporate R&D go together with low fixed capital investment?, and iii) What is the role of R&D in company performance?JRC.J.3-Knowledge for Growt

The 2017 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard

The 2017 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) comprises the 2500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D in the world in 2016/17. These companies, based in 43 countries, each invested over €24 million in R&D for a total of €741.6bn which is approximately 90% of the world’s business-funded R&D. They include 567 EU companies accounting for 26% of the total, 822 US companies for 39%, 365 Japanese companies for 14%, 376 Chinese for 8% and 370 from the rest-of-the-world (RoW) for 13%. This report analyses the main changes in companies’ R&D and economic indicators over the past year and their performance over the past ten years. It also includes results from additional complementary studies on companies’ productivity, their development of ICT-related technologies and scientific publication activity.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

Assessing Policy Options for the EU Cohesion Policy 2014-2020

In this paper we estimate the impact on GDP of Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 for 267 EU regions running a set of simulations with RHOMOLO, a spatial CGE model tailored for economic analysis at the subnational level. We do so by treating the different parts of Cohesion Policy as exogenous and independent shocks, which are first considered separately and then combined to estimate an overall effect. Our simulation suggests that European regions display significant heterogeneity in their deviations from the baseline due to Cohesion Policy, both in absolute terms and relative to the amounts received.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt