| Abstract: | There is wide agreement that the high social rate of returnto research and innovation justifies government support forresearch. There is, however, only limited evidence on the effectivenessof different public research programmes. Reliable measurementof programme effectiveness is hampered by the ‘selectivity’problem (public funding goes to proposals judged in advanceto be likely to succeed) and the question of ‘additivity’(whether public funding increases total spending on researchor merely displaces funding from other sources). The selectivityproblem can be mitigated by building evaluation into programmedesign, either by partial randomization of the grant process,or by recording the rankings used in grant evaluation and makingthis information available to researchers. The additivity questionreflects the more fundamental problem that the ultimate objectiveof these programmes is to have long-term effects that are inherentlyvery difficult to measure and attribute to particular programmes. |
