Abstract
As Chapter 3 emphasized, infratechnology is a fundamental factor in explaining the often observed complementarity between governmental R&D allocations and private R&D funding. Buttressed by empirical results, we found that this observed complementarity was the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding, infratechnology, and knowledge sharing. Thus, investigations of the effect of governmental R&D allocations in stimulating growth in the economy, and therefore the proper role for governmental R&D allocations as part of a rational economic policy, requires that we have accurate measures of the level of infratechnology investment and that we begin to look empirically at the link between such investment and productivity growth in the economy.
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Notes
This chapter is based on research funded by the National Science Foundation Science and Engineering Indicators Program. See Link (1991).
One laboratory that provided expenditure data did not answer this question.
Because Business Week uses an alternative industry classification scheme in their R&D Scoreboard, responding companies were re-classified on the basis of their four-digit SIC classification as reported in the Standard and Poor’s Register of Corporations.
The 1989 industry R&D data come from unpublished National Science Foundation tables. The National Science Foundation data are not perfectly matched with the Scoreboard data. The latter could include engineering costs and funding from outside of industry.
The ratio of infratechnology R&D to total self-financed R&D was calculated for each company that invested in infratechnology research. The mean of these percentages is reported in Table 4.4.
These percentages were calculated by summing investments in infratechnology research by all responding companies, by industry, and dividing by total industry R&D as reported by the National Science Foundation. In 1980, 24 companies (see Table 4.4) reported their actual infratechnology investments. The other 102 companies’ investments were $0 for the purpose of calculating these percentages.
These data came from National Science Foundation (1990). Of course, there is no way of knowing if the companies included in the calculation of a specific industry’s TFP are grouped in that same industry for the purpose of the National Science Foundation’s R&D to sales ratios. The company-fmanced R&D to sales ratio for 1980 for SIC 37 is unpublished. It was approximated using the average ratio of company-financed R&D-to-sales in SIC 37 to that in SIC 371 for the years 1984 to 1988.
The correlation coefficient between ORD/S and IR/S is 0.72, and it is significant at the.20 level.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Leyden, D.P., Link, A.N. (1992). Investments in Infratechnology Research. In: Government’s Role in Innovation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2936-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2936-7_4
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