Wishful thinking about R&D policy targets: what governments promise and what they actually deliver

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Adão
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/21830; https://doi.org/Carvalho, Adão (2017), Wishful thinking about R&D policy targets: what governments promise and what they actually deliver, Science and Public Policy, on-line 7 November 2017, pp. 1-19. (https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scx069); https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scx069; https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scx069
• topic: R&D policy; R&D goals; policy effectiveness; R&D intensity

As a revival of the 1960s, a new era of R&D policy based on R&D intensity goals gained momentum at the turn of the century with the Lisbon Agenda and Barcelona target. Setting GERD to GDP targets has become fashionable again at a much larger scale. This article is focused on assessing the effectiveness of this policy at an international level, by using a database purposefully built for this research based on information of 45 countries and 112 R&D intensity targets. The results show a consistent pattern of failure of this policy across countries and at country level, and only exceptionally a country was able to reach the intended R&D intensity targets. Governments have been promising much more than they are capable of delivering but, paradoxically, the popularity of the R&D intensity indictor remains high despite the complete lack of effectiveness of R&D policy based on R&D intensity targets.