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...

Although the use of patent indicators in statistics has been under discussion for a long time, there are surprisingly very few studies devoted to explaining the use of patent indicators as performance indicators in performance-based research funding systems. The widespread assumption is based on...

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effort, including significant investments in...

Government funding of innovation can have a significant impact not only on the rate of technical change, but also on its direction. In this paper, we examine the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an emergent general...

Empirical evidence suggests that positive externalities from R&D exceed negative ones. According to conventional wisdom, this calls for R&D subsidies. This paper develops a quality-ladder growth model with overlapping generations which evaluates the positive and normative implications of R&D...