Industry R&D Location – the role of accessibility to university R&D and institutions of higher education

Martin Andersson, Urban Gråsjö () and Charlie Karlsson ()

No 68, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: The rapid globalization in recent years has created a radically new competitive situation for the rich industrialized countries. Newly industrialized countries and not least China have become more and more successful in penetrating the markets in the rich industrialized countries with increasingly more advanced export products. This has generated a discussion in the rich industrialized countries on how to meet this increased international competition. In some countries demands for various protective measures have been raised while in others the discussion has mainly focused on how to develop a competitive strategy mainly concentrating on making the own products more sophisticated by increasing their knowledge content. This is by no means since the direct product development is controlled to a high extent by multinational firms, which to an increasing degree are foreign owned. Governments mainly have to rely on indirect measures, such as increasing the volume of higher education and public, mainly university R&D. This raises the question: how responsive is private industry to these kinds of indirect measures. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent that the location and the extent of higher education and university R&D, respectively, influence the location and the extent of industry R&D in Sweden using an accessibility approach. After an extensive literature survey, we develop a simple theoretical model for the location of R&D from the perspective of a multinational enterprise. From this theoretical model, we then deduce our empirical model, which we then estimate in the form of a Tobit model using data from Swedish labour market regions and municipalities. We show that the location of industry R&D in Sweden can be partly explained by the intra-municipal accessibility to students in higher education, while the accessibility to university R&D turned out to be insignificant

Keywords: industry R&D; university R&D; higher education; region; municipality; location; accessibility; Tobit model; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 O38 O52 R11 R12 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2006-05-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu, nep-sea and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://static.sys.kth.se/itm/wp/cesis/cesiswp68.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0068

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vardan Hovsepyan ().