The European Policy Perspective

Abstract

The topics addressed in this document are a concern common to all advanced industrial countries, and in a particular sense to the European Union. The main empirical story has been about technical spillovers around advanced product development, the implications of these spillovers for economic growth and the possi­bilities of stimulating such spillovers through advanced public procurement of privately demanded public goods. The discussion of the previous chapters has been conducted against the background, documented in econometric literature, of the significant underinvestment in private R&D investment among the industrial countries, and how the engineering industry is to remain effective as the backbone of economic growth and welfare among the old industrial economies. More precisely, the question has been how to help overcome that underinvestment through policy. In the earlier chapters, the JAS 39 Gripen development project has been placed in a macroeconomic Swedish and South African context. The main concern there has been the size of the macroeconomic spillover multiplier in an industrially advanced and an industrially developing economy. In this analysis also the significance of direct exports of the Gripen military aircraft and related products was considered. The study has been partly methodological and partly policy oriented. These results, however, carry a wider interest beyond Sweden and South Africa. So now the time has come to broaden the view, and to take the Swedish story up to the European level.