Swedish Business R&D and its Export Dependence

Karin Bergman and Olof Ejermo

No 2011/5, Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research

Abstract: Sweden has seen a rise in business R&D intensities and dependence on exports to make its economy grow since the early 1990s. This paper examines the role of foreign sales for stimulating R&D as compared to a domestic sales effect. In line with the literature, we find in cross-sections from 1991 to 2001 that R&D rises proportionally to sales. But among manufacturing firms foreign sales is distinctly more strongly associated with an increase in R&D than domestic sales. For service firms domestic sales are as important as foreign. The results are consistent with the hypotheses that manufacturing firms more easily separate production from R&D, that they economize on transport costs and are subject to learning-by-export effects. In general, the results highlight the dependence and the role of openness for stimulating R&D in a small economy, especially among manufacturing firms.

Keywords: R&D; size; exports; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011-08-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-int and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/201105_Bergman_Ejermo.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Swedish Business R&D and its Export Dependence (2011)
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:lucirc:2011_005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research, Lund University, PO Box 117, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Torben Schubert ().