سیاست تحقیق و توسعه،تجارت و نوآوری فرآیند

We set up a simple trade model with two countries hosting one firm each. The firms invest in cost-reducing R&D, and each government may grant R&D subsidies to the domestic firm. We show that it is optimal for a government to provide higher R&D subsidies the lower the level of trade costs, even if the firms are independent monopolies. If firms produce imperfect substitutes, policy competition may become so fierce that only one of the firms survives. International policy harmonization eliminates policy competition and ensures a symmetric outcome. However, it is shown that harmonization is not necessarily welfare maximizing. The optimal coordinated policies may imply an asymmetric outcome with R&D subsidies to only one of the firms.

This paper has two main purposes. The first is to explore the relationship between trade costs and R&D investments. We show that increased integration (lower trade costs) may increase both private and social incentives to invest in R&D, and may lead firms to sell more both domestically and abroad. The second purpose is to study the effects of policy competition and cooperation in imperfectly competitive international markets, and in particular to show that R&D subsidies may in fact reduce the number of product varieties in the market. This turns out to be true both if the subsidies are set in a policy game between governments maximizing domestic welfare and if the governments set R&D subsidies cooperatively to maximize aggregate welfare.

In this paper we study optimal industrial R&D investments in an international setting. First, we show that trade liberalization generates more R&D, more sales, possibly also in the domestic market, and higher R&D subsidies. The policy effects do not rely on any business-stealing motive; even for a monopoly it would be the case that optimal R&D subsidies and domestic sales increase when trade costs go down. Second, we study in some detail policy competition between two governments pursuing their national interests. Contrary to most of the literature, we explicitly include the effects for domestic consumers in the analysis. We find that the effects of policy competition depend critically on the characteristics of the market. If the goods are poor substitutes, competition between the firms is not very strong, and for the governments the consumer surplus motive for subsidies is more important than the business-stealing one. In such industries there will typically be a symmetric outcome, where both governments subsidize R&D in the domestic firm, and where both firms invest in R&D and sell their products in the two markets. When the goods are close substitutes, on the other hand, the business-stealing motive for subsidies dominates, and competition may become so tough that only one firm survives in the market.22