Through the Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs), rural industries and the Australian Government together invest some $490 million a year in R&D. This co-investment model has important strengths, including: helping to ensure that public money is not spent on research of little...

This Productivity Commission staff working paper (by Paula Barnes) examines sectoral investment in intangible assets in Australia following on from a previous paper on an examination of intangibles assets in the market sector as a whole. It highlights some significant issues relating to the...

Investment in capital is important for economic growth. But capital is not just physical assets; firms also invest in 'soft' capital such as knowledge, firm-specific skills, and better ways of doing business. This investment results in accumulation of 'intangible assets'. Intangible assets have...

The objective of this study was to undertake a series of modelling exercises that took advantage of the additional available data to explore the effects of R&D on Australian productivity. However, despite the advances in data and methods, our research was unable to find a consistent robust...

The Productivity Commission’s research report into ‘Public Support for Science and Innovation’ was released March 2007. The Australian Government asked the Commission to evaluate the economic, social and environmental returns on this investment. The main message from the Commission’s...