Measuring Firms’ R&D Effects on Technical Progress: Japan in the 199

One of the important public policy issues in science and technology is to ascertain if and how firms' investments in research and development (R&D) contribute to technical progress at firm and industry levels. Griliches (1979) made a pioneering contribution to our understanding of economic growth by pointing out that accumulation of firms' investments in R&D and creation of knowledge will lead to technical progress. In this paper we present a method based on index number theory for estimating technical progress and then apply it for estimating technical progress for Japanese manufacturing firms in the 1990s. Estimated technical progress is then used to test the above Griliches hypothesis