سرمایه گذاری تحقیق و توسعه و سیاست های تحقیق و توسعه دولت در صنایع الکترونیک در کره و تایوان

Focusing on the electronics industry, this paper verifies and compares how bipolar R&D policy contributed to growth in productivity in Korea and Taiwan. Two implications are derived from the empirical results. First, in Korea, government's business group-centered R&D policy encouraged private R&D expenditure rather than public R&D infrastructure. Second, and in contrast, publicly funded R&D infrastructure capital stock, in recent years, significantly induced private R&D expenditures of Taiwanese electronics firms. These two implications suggest that there are various potential ways to cope with externalities associated with R&D investment in emerging countries.

According to statistics of US Display Search Inc., country-wise, liquid crystal display (LCD) production in South Korea and Taiwan had the largest and second largest global market shares, respectively, in the first half of 2004. In terms of corporate ranking, some individual firms in these countries also took the top positions. In addition, as represented by the new release announcements of the 63-in. plasma television by Samsung Electronics and the 42-in. LCD television by LG Electronics in 2002, recent technological development continuous to be noteworthy, especially in the area of LCD development. The objective of this study is to explore how government R&D policies in Korea and Taiwan have coped with externalities associated with R&D investment. One of the notable features of R&D investment is that the output has the properties of public goods, and some existing literature accordingly regards its social rate of return to be higher than its private rate of return.1 Therefore, in industrialized countries, providing government subsidies, granting property rights, charging differential prices for their use by others, and combinations of these are major policies that deal with market failures that result due to externalities. This paper conjectures that government R&D policies encourage electronics firms in Korea and Taiwan to undertake externality-generating activities.

This study examined how domestic R&D systems in Korea and Taiwan tried to promote private R&D investments by focusing on electronics industries that have been internationally competitive since the late 1990s. The probability that a firm's R&D investment is finally linked to production is not always high, but once commercially viable, it becomes a powerful engine for industrial growth. Hence, historically, governments in Korea and Taiwan were actively engaged with the private sectors. However, since the Korean government revised its R&D law in 1981, the effect of public R&D policies reversed. This is one of the factors that caused the production processes of the electronics industries in these two countries to develop divergently. One of the crucial conclusions of this study is, even though the frameworks of R&D investment of these two countries diverged, both countries were exposed to strong competition in the world market. This means that the approach toward promotion of private R&D investment does not necessarily have to be unified. Another implication is that as business group reform progresses, Korea must find a new risk-sharing scheme that is complementary with a firm's R&D investment activity.