This special issue examines the policy challenges and government responses to disruptive technologies. It explores the risks, benefits, and trade-offs of deploying disruptive technologies, and examines the efficacy of traditional governance approaches and the need for new regulatory and...

As intellectual property chapters are now regularly part of free trade agreements, countries need to have a clear view of what elements of a patent system will encourage domestic innovation and what elements will simply raise the cost of goods and services. Drawing on the range of empirical...

This paper explores one particular vector of entrepreneurship in nanotechnologies: public R&D funding. Drawing mainly from official archival databases and focused interviews I do a comparative study of the EU and US public R&D funding systems. My emphasis is on institutional funding coming from...

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation where firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. The optimal assignment of property rights must...

Today, Public policy apart from addressing the concerns/aspirations of the nation, must also be WTO complaint. All the subsidies are on the chopping mat, exceptions are few. One such an exception is subsidy to Ramp;D. This article gives a (Indian) historical perspective on this subject. The...

In the latest 30 years, Costa Rica's real GDP per capita has more than doubled, driven by increasing labour utilisation. Labour productivity has instead stagnated at around 30% of the more advanced OECD countries. Productivity growth has been lacklustre despite the opening up of markets to...

In theory, innovation processes lie behind the evolution of national systems as they create interacting dynamics among organisations. Institutions and policies are considered means for influencing these interactive dynamics, such as shifting innovative focus from traditional to environmentally...

The paper aims at assessing discrete complementarities in innovation policies in the context of the Brazilian industry in 2003. The paper considers the approach advanced by Mohnen and and Röller [European Economic Review, 2005] that focuses on supermodularity and submodularity tests for...

We examine the use of subsidies to R&D in a mixed and a private duopoly market. We show that the socially optimal R&D subsidy is increasing in the degree of spillovers but it is lower in the private duopoly. The optimal R&D subsidy leads to an increase in total R&D and production, however, it...

Industrial policy is back on the agenda and the consensus is that it must be different "this time" from the past. We redefine industrial policy for industrialised countries as a strategy to promote "high-road competitiveness", understood as the ability of an economy to achieve "Beyond-GDP"...