Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

International Competition and U.S. R&D Subsidies: A Quantitative Welfare Analysis

Contents:

Author Info

  • Giammario Impullitti

Abstract

The geographical distribution of R&D investment changes dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1970s U.S. firms are the uncontested world leaders in R&D investment in most manufacturing sectors. Later, led by Japan and Europe, foreign firms start challenging American R&D leadership in many sectors of the economy. In this period of increasing competition we also observe a substantial increase in the U.S. R&D subsidy. In a version of the multi-country quality ladder growth model I study the effects of foreign R&D competition on domestic welfare and on the optimal R&D subsidy. I build a new empirical index of international R&D rivalry that can be used to perform quantitative analysis in this type of frameworks. In a calibrated version of the model I focus on the period 1979-1991 and perform the following quantitative exercises: first, I evaluate the quantitative effects of the observed increase in foreign R&D competition on U.S. welfare. I find that the positive growth effect and the negative business-stealing effect of foreign competition on U.S. welfare substantially balance each other, and the overall welfare effect of competition is negligible - less then 1 percent of per-capita consumption. Moreover, using estimates of the effective U.S. R&D subsidy rate, I compute the distance from optimality of the observed subsidy at each level of competition. I find that international competition increases the optimal subsidy and that, surprisingly, the U.S. subsidy observed in the data is fairly close to the optimal subsidy.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. 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.
File URL: http://www.fedea.es/pub/est_economicos/2008/15-08.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by FEDEA in its series Economic Reports with number 15-08.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Jun 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:fda:fdacee:15-08

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.fedea.es

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

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.:
as in new window
  1. Baldwin, Richard & Robert-Nicoud, Frédéric, 2005. "Trade and Growth with Heterogeneous Firms," CEPR Discussion Papers 4965, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  2. Giammario Impullitti, 2007. "International Schumpeterian Competition and Optimal R&D subsidies," Economics Working Papers ECO2007/55, European University Institute.
  3. Omar Licandro & Antonio Navas-Ruiz, 2007. "Trade liberalization, competition and growth," Economics Working Papers we076536, Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía.
  4. Nicholas Bloom & Rachel Griffith & John Van Reenen, 2007. "Do R&D Tax Credits Work? Evidence from a Panel of Countries 1979-1997," Discussion Papers 07-020, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
  5. Philippe Aghion & Richard Blundell & Rachel Griffith & Peter Howitt & Susanne Prantl, 2009. "The Effects of Entry on Incumbent Innovation and Productivity," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 91(1), pages 20-32, February.
  6. Melitz, Marc J, 2002. "The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity," CEPR Discussion Papers 3381, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  7. Carol Corrado & Charles Hulten & Daniel Sichel, 2006. "Intangible capital and economic growth," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-24, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  8. Lundborg, Per & Segerstrom, Paul S., 1998. "The Growth and Welfare Effects of International Mass Migration," Working Paper Series 146, Trade Union Institute for Economic Research.
  9. Charles I. Jones & John C. Williams, 1997. "Measuring the social return to R&D," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1997-12, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  10. Arvind Subramanian & Raghuram Rajan & Ioannis Tokatlidis & Kalpana Kochhar & Utsav Kumar, 2006. "India's Pattern of Development: What Happened, What Follows?," IMF Working Papers 06/22, International Monetary Fund.
  11. Basu, Susanto, 1996. "Procyclical Productivity: Increasing Returns or Cyclical Utilization?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 111(3), pages 719-51, August.
  12. Segerstrom, Paul S, 1998. "Endogenous Growth without Scale Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(5), pages 1290-1310, December.
  13. Peter Gustafsson & Paul Segerstrom, 2010. "Trade Liberalization and Productivity Growth," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(2), pages 207-228, 05.
  14. Tang, Paul J. G. & Walde, Klaus, 2001. "International competition, growth and welfare," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(8), pages 1439-1459, August.
  15. Bronwyn Hall, 1994. "R&D Tax Policy During the Eighties: Success or Failure?," NBER Working Papers 4240, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  16. Elias Dinopoulos & Peter Thompson, 1999. "Scale effects in Schumpeterian models of economic growth," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 9(2), pages 157-185.
  17. Peretto, Pietro F., 2003. "Endogenous market structure and the growth and welfare effects of economic integration," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 177-201, May.
  18. Peter J. Klenow & Andres Rodriguez-Clare, 2004. "Externalities and Growth," NBER Working Papers 11009, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  19. Jagdish Bhagwati & Arvind Panagariya & T. N. Srinivasan, 2004. "The Muddles over Outsourcing," International Trade 0408004, EconWPA.
  20. Hall, B.H., 1993. "R & D Tax Policy During the Eighties: Success or Failure?," Working Papers e-93-1, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
  21. Kenneth R. French & James M. Poterba, 1991. "Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets," NBER Working Papers 3609, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  22. Jones, Charles I, 1995. "Time Series Tests of Endogenous Growth Models," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 110(2), pages 495-525, May.
  23. Paul A. Samuelson, 2004. "Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 135-146, Summer.
  24. Eaton, Jonathan & Kortum, Samuel, 1999. "International Technology Diffusion: Theory and Measurement," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 40(3), pages 537-70, August.
  25. van de Klundert, Theo & Smulders, Sjak, 1997. " Growth, Competition and Welfare," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 99(1), pages 99-118, March.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Giammario Impullitti, 2007. "International Schumpeterian Competition and Optimal R&D subsidies," Economics Working Papers ECO2007/55, European University Institute.
  2. Wolf-Heimo Grieben & Fuat Sener, 2009. "Labor Unions, Globalization, and Mercantilism," CESifo Working Paper Series 2889, CESifo Group Munich.
  3. Guido Cozzi & Giammario Impullitti, 2008. "Government spending composition, technical change and wage inequality," Working Papers 2009_02, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fda:fdacee:15-08

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Carmen Arias).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.