Pesquisa e desenvolvimento, capital de conhecimento e estrutura produtiva: os efeitos do Programa de Subvenções Econômicas à inovação no Brasil

Abstract

Fiscal incentives, subsidies, public expenditures and other forms of public capital support for research, development and innovation (P,D&I) have become recurrent policy instruments in Brazil and in various world economies. Underlying the public development in P,D&I is the recognition of the channels of positive impacts generated by the production of knowledge. New knowledge increases the capital stock, reduces unit production costs, and reinforces the competitive tendencies of certain sectoral activities of a productive system, both in the domestic and in the external market. Thus, the present dissertation sought to build a dynamic computable general equilibrium model capable of dealing with these systemic relations between knowledge and the productive system. The model brings innovations by incorporating in its theoretical and applied structure of the stock-flow relationship between R&D investment and sectoral knowledge capital, which presupposes a one-year lag in recursive solutions. Like investments for gross fixed capital formation, investments in R&D show a positive relation with the expected rate of return.. Unprecedented in Brazil, this theoretical construction of the model allows us to evaluate the role of public development in P, D & I in the economic effects that are projected to the Brazilian economy. In this variant and as a way to explore some analytical potentialities of the developed model, this thesis analyzes the economic impacts of the policy of production subsidies granted and linked to the economic activities of technological innovation. The main findings indicated that the subsidies associated to innovation projects generate gains in knowledge capital — exemplified by the set of knowledge, techniques learned, procedures and innovations that result in intangible value of companies and organizations — in the Brazilian economy and for productive activities that do not are directly served by the subsidy policy, whose indirect effects come from the broadcasts established by the intersectoral channels of the economic system. Similar to the results of other empirical studies, positive effects have been found in the tangent to the expansion of the innovative effort of companies benefiting from some type of legal program in relation to non-beneficiary companies. Thus, the absence of this form of public development, in addition to negatively affecting the various markets for goods and services and primary factors in the economy, would lead to a retraction of industrial activities of greater technological intensity, penalizing the technological base of companies most innovative in the country. The productive capacity, measured mainly by the stock of physical capital and knowledge, as well as the respective flows of investment, would be reduced and would deepen the economic retraction of the country in the long term.