سیاست تحقیق و توسعه با لایه هایی از یکپارچگی اقتصادی

This paper examines whether the optimal unilateral R&D policy for an open economy is a subsidy or a tax. It constructs a general equilibrium model with three successive layers of international integration: (a) trade in goods, (b) trade in technologies with international R&D spillovers and (c) internationally-coordinated R&D policy. Trade in technologies introduces the possibility that an R&D subsidy will have such strong, negative terms-of-trade effects that it harms domestic welfare. Numerical simulations of the OECD show this is a possibility for the US and Japan. With international R&D spillovers a domestic R&D subsidy may reduce domestic innovation.

Until recently, R&D policy could usefully be viewed as a purely domestic issue, but this is changing as international markets become more integrated. This paper focuses on three “layers” of international integration that affect the analysis of R&D policy: (1) trade in goods, (2) trade in technologies with international R&D spillovers and (3) coordinated worldwide R&D policy. Several papers have analyzed strategic R&D policy in the context of international spillovers, including Muniagurria and Singh (1997), Leahy and Neary (1999) and Kang (2000). This work is in the partial equilibrium, oligopoly tradition of Spencer and Brander (1983) in which the home government's policy aims to shift oligopoly rents. Leahy and Neary (1999) provide the following rationale for concentrating on these models instead of monopolistic competition: Most recent discussions of R&D spillovers in open economies, such as the work on endogenous growth of Grossman and Helpman (1991), have assumed they occur in industries characterized by monopolistic competition. The combination of free entry (so long-run profits are competed away) and no strategic interdependence between firms, leads to models which, while complicated in other respects, have very simple implications for policy. R&D spillovers towards other domestic firms generate an externality, which should be subsidized. (p. 40)

Conventional wisdom had it that an R&D subsidy would improve welfare in the context of R&D spillovers. That conventional analysis, however, did not take account of international integration. This paper demonstrates that with international flows of intellectual property the welfare effects of a unilateral, positive R&D subsidy are ambiguous. When intellectual property is not traded internationally, an R&D subsidy stimulates growth in varieties that improves the domestic terms of trade. Since the terms-of-trade effects reinforce the benefits of correcting the R&D externality, this point has previously been overlooked in the literature. Adverse terms-of-trade effects drive the cases in which a unilateral R&D subsidy harms domestic welfare. This was shown by establishing a benchmark model with domestic R&D spillovers and free trade in intermediate and final goods. Home's R&D subsidy always improves Home's terms of trade and its welfare in the benchmark model.