The impact of government's fundings and tax incentives on industrial R&D investments—Empirical evidences from industrial sectors in Shanghai

This paper is an empirical assessment of the impact of government's direct fundings and tax incentives on R&D investments of industrial sectors in Shanghai. The analysis is based on a panel consisting of 32 industrial sectors for the period 1993–2002.The general finding is that both government's direct fundings as an incentive stimulating policy instrument and industrial sectors' own fundings in science and technology activities have positive effects on the industrial R&D investment. The stability of the policy further enhances the positive effect. However, the effect of the tax incentives is not straightforward. We observe that the enterprises in the industrial sectors tend to switch to more general and less costly science and technology activities, which can be regarded as a less desirable effect of the tax incentives.