The Effect of Research and Development Expenditures on Economic Growth: New Evidences

Abstract

Research and Development (R&D) is one of the most important variables that affect the country’s economic growth and development through increasing the technology capabilities, enlargement of resource base and promoting in the capability of resource utilization. Countries that innovate by conducting R&D activities always have high economic growth and many researchers emphasized this prominent role of the R&D on economic growth in numerous studies. This study contributes in two ways to this stream of research. Providing new estimates of the effect of R&D expenditures on economic growth is the first contribution to literature. On the other hand, there are different types of R&D expenditures and each of them has different magnitude on the economic growth. Therefore, this study provides evidences about the magnitudes of R&D expenditures. The effect of different types of R&D expenditures on economic growth for the selected OECD countries is examined in this study by utilizing from GMM framework using the data belonging the period of 2003-2014. Income and different R&D expenditure data used to analyze that obtained from OECD Stat. As a conclusion, it is found that all of the R&D expenditures have positive and significant effect on economic growth in selected OECD countries but magnitudes are various. Therefore, policy makers should design the R&D stimulation policies depending on the characteristics of the countries. Accordingly, countries must allocate more resources to different types R&D expenditure for achieving sustainable rate of growth.