Funding Structure of the European and North American Clusters: Results from an Independent Questionnaire

We use a unique dataset of 167 North American and European clusters’ funding structures, obtained from an independent questionnaire survey carried out in the first half of 2016. The aim of this study is to determine possible differences in the proportions of public and private funds in the financing clusters from these two regions. Our results show that there is not a statistically significant difference in public-to-private funding sources among the European vs. American clusters. The proportion of public-to-private sources is on average approximately 43:57 in both regions. However, overall private sources of financing are significantly higher than funds obtained from public sources when we compare average values without respect to geographical regions. Furthermore, using a seemingly unrelated regression model, we identify dominant sources of public funding – in the European clusters dominate European Union budgets (24.29%), and for American clusters, the more prevailing sources are national (26.25%) and local budgets (10%).