IPR for Public and Private Innovations, and Growth

The empirical analyses show that public and private R&D are strongly intertwined. On the one hand, the existence of large direct spillovers from public R&D to private industry has extensively proven. Yet, both a substitutability and complementarity relationship between private and public R&D investment has been found. From an institutional point of view, to stimulate the technology transfer from public R&D to private industry the U.S. adopted an uniform patent policy for public funded research, such as that guaranteed by the Bayh-Dole Act. This paper contributes to explain this empirical evidence. Within a neo-Schumpeterian endogenous growth model, it is shown that the intellectual appropriation share of a new commercial valuable idea by private firms and the subsidy of private R&D cost are two equivalent ways to stimulate private R&D effort, and they affect in the same way the endogenous per capita output growth rate. The existence of a trade off between the per capita output growth rate and level has found. The main policy implication of these results consists into guarantee two different regimes of IPR for industrial and public innovations. Furthermore, it is shown that the large direct spillovers from public R&D to private industry allows to have better growth performance even if public R&D investment crowds out private innovative effort. Again a trade off between the per capita output growth rate and level has found.