Mitze Timo, Makkonen Teemu
University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense, Denmark.
University of Eastern Finland, Yliopistokatu 2, 80101 Joensuu, Finland.
Technol Forecast Soc Change. 2023 Jan;186:122073. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122073. Epub 2022 Sep 30.
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health restrictions led to a significant slump in economic activities around the globe. This slump has been met by various policy actions to cushion the detrimental socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis and eventually bring the economy back on track. We provide an ex-ante evaluation of the effectiveness of a massive expansion of RDI funding in Finland to stimulate post-crisis recovery growth through an increase in RDI activities of Finnish firms. We make use of the fact that novel RDI grants for firms in disruptive circumstances granted in 2020 were allocated through established RDI policy channels. This allows us to estimate the structural link between RDI funding and economic growth for Finnish NUTS-3 regions based on pre-COVID-19 data. Estimates are then used to predict regional recovery growth out of sample and to quantify the growth contribution of RDI funding. Depending on the chosen scenario, our out-of-sample predictions point to a mean recovery growth rate of GDP between ~2-4 % in 2021 after a decline of up to -2.5 % in 2020. RDI funding constitutes a significant pillar of the recovery process with mean contributions in terms of GDP growth of between 0.4 and 1 %-points.
新冠疫情及随后的公共卫生限制措施导致全球经济活动大幅下滑。为缓解新冠危机带来的有害社会经济后果并最终使经济重回正轨，各国采取了各种政策行动。我们对芬兰大幅增加研发与创新（RDI）资金以通过增加芬兰企业的研发与创新活动来刺激危机后复苏增长的有效性进行了事前评估。我们利用了这样一个事实，即2020年向处于颠覆性环境中的企业提供的新型研发与创新补助金是通过既定的研发与创新政策渠道分配的。这使我们能够根据新冠疫情前的数据估算芬兰NUTS - 3地区研发与创新资金与经济增长之间的结构联系。然后，利用这些估算值对样本外的地区复苏增长进行预测，并量化研发与创新资金对增长的贡献。根据所选情景，我们的样本外预测表明，在2020年下降高达 - 2.5%之后，2021年GDP的平均复苏增长率约为2% - 4%。研发与创新资金是复苏进程的重要支柱，对GDP增长的平均贡献在0.4至1个百分点之间。
