Research and development economics

• Current Issues in Planning and Guiding Public R & D Investment in New Zealand: Planning under Uncertainty (2007)
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  Presented to the Australian Agricultural Economics Society Meeting, Queenstown, New Zealand, February 14, 2007. The paper discusses the respective procedures used by The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and the Tertiary Education Commission for allocating funds for public investment in R & D in New Zealand. The theme of the paper is that if financial portfolio analysis were available to the decision makers a better account would be taken of the risk-tradeoffs in such investment. The paper discusses why this is not possible due to data limitations and lack of analytical techniques.

• Whither the Crown Research Institutes? Funding Issues (2006)   (Download PDF)
  This paper continues the theme of earlier papers with regard to public funding of R & D in New Zealand. The Crown Research Institutes receive a major share of the Government funds made available. Those institutes specialising in agricultural research have lost share of government funds, though others have gained. To some extent, the agricultural institutes have made up their funding from private sector sponsorship.

• Public Investment in Agricultural Research in New Zealand (2006)  (Download PDF)  (View PDF)
  By Robin Johnson, Frank Scrimgeour and Julian Manning. This paper on public investment in agricultural R & D was published in Farm Policy Journal, Vol 31 No. 1, February Quarter, 2006. The paper discusses the science reforms in New Zealand in 1990-91 and their impact on the research institutes specialising in agricultural research. One of the aims of the reforms was to encourage more private investment in R & D. Following a belief in crowding-out theory the state managers subsequently starved the agricultural sector of public funds for some years with consequent reductions in essential investment in animal and plant research particularly. In recent years, the agricultural research interests have combined together to present government with a coordinated and coherent plan for increased investment, both private and public, in the agricultural sector. A positive response from Government has yet to emerge.

• Investment in Private R & D before 1989: Use of Proxies    (Download PDF)
  This paper, presented to the NZ Association of Economists in June 2006, is an update on the earlier papers in this section. A problem with the earlier papers has been the lack of data on private investment in R & D in the years before 1990, when official surveys commenced. In this paper I explore two new proxies for private investment for the period 1965 to 1990. By using regression examples drawn from the earlier work a variable based on public grants to the private sector was found best. This paper includes the new data series needed to replace earlier data sets.

• The Structure and Economic Impact of R & D Organisation in New Zealand (2005)   (Download PDF)
  This paper reviews earlier papers on the organisation of R & D in New Zealand. It was presented to the NZ Society of Agricultural Economists on August 26, 2005. After discussing data sources for time series analysis the paper discusses the generally poor econometric relationships between national investment in R & D and industry level income. The reasons for this lie in the dominance of government R & D in NZ and the loose connections between R & D investment decisions and possible applications. It is argued that for better demonstration of such relationships, analysis should be concentrated on project by project cost-benefit studies of which there are too few.

• Crowding out and resulting trends in research fund allocation in New Zealand 1991-2000
  Since 1991, the New Zealand Government has allocated public R & D funds through a pool system - called the public good research fund - through which research providers (universities, research institutes etc) must bid for funding on a project by project basis. This system was to counteract a previous tendency for public funding through departmental structures to discourage private sector investment - crowding out. The funding administrators were enjoined to take account of the private appropriability of the projects submitted and direct public funds to complementary projects or projects which would otherwise be under-funded. This paper finds evidence of increased private sector participation in research funding, and a declining share going to research provision over the last 9 years. The Crown Research Institutes appear to be the main beneficiaries.

• Methodologies for Measuring the Accumulated Knowledge Base in R & D   (Download PDF)
  This seven-page paper, presented to winter meeting of the NZ Association of Economists, Wellington, in July 2000, discusses some of the difficulties in defining the notion of a knowledge base [for R & D] for use in econometric analysis. The use of a capital stock concept is explored at different rates of depreciation and compared with models based on polynomial distributed lags. The latter give more plausible results in terms of delays in response rates and results are presented for 10 subsectors of the NZ market economy.

• The Rate of Return to New Zealand Research and Development Investment (1999).
  This 14-page study is based on time series analysis (1962-98) of nine economic sectors in the NZ economy relating investment in R & D to changes in gross domestic product. The basic model is Cobb-Douglas and R & D enters either as a stock variable or as a distributed lag variable. The best results are obtained from the latter specification. Also available from MAF.