Many business, academic, and scientific groups have recommended that the Congress substantiallyincrease R&D spending in the near future. President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative callsfor a doubling of spending over the next decade in selected agencies that deal with the physical sciences, including the National Science Foundation. We consider the rationale for government R&D spending in the context of globalization and as an investment in human capital and knowledge creation with gestation times far longer than Federal funding cycles. To assess the impact of a large increase in R&D spending on the science job market, we examine the impact of the 1998- 2003 doubling of the NIH budget on the bio-medical sciences. We find that the rapid increase in NIH spending and ensuing deceleration created substantial adjustment problems in the market for researchand failed to address long-standing problems with scientific careers that are likely to deter many young people from choosing a scientific career. We argue that because research simultaneouslyproduces knowledge and add to the human capital of researchers, which has greater value for youngscientists because of their longer future career life span than to older scientists, there is reason for funding agencies to tilt their awards to younger researchers.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0931.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: