Suchergebnisse

"Evaluations of government Technology Development Funds (TDF) in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Panama are surveyed. All the evaluations were done at the recipient (firm) level using data from innovation surveys, industrial surveys, and administrative records of the granting units, together with quasi-experimental econometric techniques to minimize the effects of any selection bias. TDF effectiveness is found to depend on the financing mechanism used, on the presence of non-financial constraints, on firm-university interaction, and on the characteristics of the target beneficiaries. Four levels of potential impact were considered: R&D input additionality, behavioural additionality, increases in innovative output, and improvements in performance. The evidence suggests that TDF do not crowd out private investment and that they positively affect R&D intensity. In addition, participation in TDF induces a more proactive attitude of beneficiary firms towards innovation activities. However, the analysis does not find much statistically significant impact on patents or new product sales and the evidence on firm performance is mixed, with positive results in terms of firm growth, but little corresponding positive impact on measures of firm productivity, possibly because the horizon over which the evaluation was conducted was too short"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms' productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor performance. We use firm level data from the last three surveys on Italian manufacturing firms conducted by Mediocredito-Capitalia, which cover the period 1995-2003. Using a slightly modified version of the model proposed by Harrison, Jaumandreu, Mairesse and Peters (HJMP 2005), which separates employment growth rates into those associated with old and new products, we find no evidence of significant employment displacement effects stemming from process innovation. The sources of employment growth during the period are split equally between the net contribution of product innovation and the net contribution from sales growth of old products. However, the contribution of product innovation to employment growth is somewhat lower than in the four European countries considered in HJMP 2005, and the contribution of innovation in general to productivity growth is almost nil in Italy during this period.