dc.description.abstract | There is a growing awareness tendency concerning the differences in the allotment of R&D resources to different industries in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The phenomenon of more and more R&D investment being concentrated in only few industries has been noted. In addition to promoting the increases in the overall R&D activities, drawing up a scheme for the appropriate and effective allocation of these resources may be regarded as to a useful tool for propelling the development of R&D activities nationwide. With this background in view, the objective of the dissertation concerns three issues relating to allocation of R&D resources.
In first issue, this paper is to investigate on two aspects affecting the allocation of R&D resources across industries, that is, market-pull and technology-push forces of industry and internationalization. By using a panel data on 17 OECD countries over the period 1982-2000, this paper constructs a recursive simultaneous equation model and then estimate by three-stage least squares (3SLS). The findings support that R&D decisions with the consideration of targeting unmet needs of markets can drive to increase R&D inequality. However, the effect sourced from technology-push force on allocation of R&D investment is relative weak. There is a possibility that some innovation policy aiming at the development of newly emerging or niches industries in R&D activities is a cause of this result. In addition, the empirical evidence indicates that MNCs’ oversea R&D activities can influence the extent of R&D specialization in certain industries in host countries.
In the second issue, this study applies a panel Granger causality test in heterogonous panel data models to investigate the relationship between R&D inequality and income distribution in six OECD countries (Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, and the United States) over the period 1987-2000. We are paying more attention to the role of the composition of R&D activity within a country so as to reflect the differences in R&D inequality across countries. In addition, this study also checks the robustness of the results by using different measurements for R&D inequality, the lag-order of the specification model, and datasets. The empirical results found that changes in the inequalities of R&D resources across industries in a country Granger cause changes in income inequality within that country. The results are found to be robust, and give support to the widely suspected, still ongoing trend in recent years that the advent of the knowledge economy in the form of greater R&D spending may contribute to rising income inequalities if such spending is concentrated in a few industries. It is also found that the reverse direction is relatively weak and not robust.
Finally, this study is intended to underline the important role played by the cross-industry allocation of R&D resources, as indicated by several indices measuring R&D inequality, within the manufacturing industries of each country, and how it determines cross-country productivity growth. In other words, the main issue is whether national R&D policies for promoting productivity growth should be narrowly focused or spread across a wide range of industries. The allocation modes of R&D resources are divided according whether they are research-oriented or development-oriented in type. This is done to highlight the role played by differences in the properties of R&D activities for a particular industry. In the estimation process, the phenomena of group-wise heterogeneities, serial correlations, and the correlation between pair-wise country comparisons in the sample are taken into account. The fixed-effect panel data model with cross-sectional dependence is employed on panel data drawn from 11 OECD countries for the period from 1981-2000. When the other variables are controlled, we find that the effect of R&D inequality on productivity growth is significantly positive and the coefficient of its squared term is negative. Moreover, the impact of R&D intensity depends on the degree of inequality. This lends support to the notion that concentrating R&D spending on a few suitable industries is an important factor in encouraging cross-country productivity growth. Specialization of R&D activities in certain relevant industries creates better opportunities for promoting productivity performance, because of reaching sufficient levels of scale and allowing for accumulation of experience. Furthermore, the results reflect the fact that development-oriented manufacturing industries enjoy higher productivity growth as a result of this specification policy. However, the case for research-oriented industries is relatively weak.
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