چارچوب سابق ارزیابی حول و حوش برای منافع منطقه ای از پشتیبانی عمومی و تحقیق و توسعه پروژه ها

This paper draws on the knowledge-base implicit in ex post evaluations of publicly funded R&D and other related conceptual and empirical studies to suggest a framework for the ex ante evaluation of the regional benefits from R&D projects. The framework developed comprises two main elements: an inventory of the global private and social benefits which might result from any R&D project; and, an assessment of the share of these global benefits which might accrue to a host region, taking into account the characteristics of the R&D project and the region’s innovation system. The inventory of global benefits separately identifies private and social benefits and distinguishes between increments to public and private knowledge stocks, benefits to R&D productivity and benefits from commercialisation. Potential market and ‘pure’ knowledge spillovers are also considered separately. The paper concludes with the application of the framework to two illustrative case studies.

This paper arose from problems faced by the UK’s regional development agencies in assessing ex ante the regional benefits of publicly supported R&D. The agencies’ policy objective was to address the standard market failure which leads to socially sub-optimal levels of private sector R&D investment (Nelson, 1959, Arrow, 1962 and Dasgupta and David, 1994); difficulties arose, however, in justifying public support for R&D within the UK’s standard public sector investment appraisal procedures.1 These typically involve discounted cash flow calculations, raising particular problems when applied to R&D projects due to (a) the difficulty of defining ex ante the range of benefits which might stem from the project; (b) uncertainty relating to the scale and timing of such benefits; and (c) doubts about the share of these benefits which will be appropriated by the host region.2

Our basic argument here is that the knowledge-base derived from ex post evaluations of publicly supported R&D projects, and related conceptual and empirical studies, now provide sufficient evidence to enable ex ante judgements to be made about the likely regional benefits of publicly supported R&D projects. We develop a framework for ex ante evaluation based around an inventory of potential global benefits (i.e. Table 1), and an assessment of the factors which determine the share of these global benefits which will accrue to the host region. Two case studies illustrate the application of the evaluation framework.