Wishful thinking about R&D policy targets: what governments promise and what they actually deliver

Abstract

As a revival of the 1960s, a new era of R&D policy based on R&D intensity goals gained momentum at the turn of the century with the Lisbon Agenda and Barcelona target. Setting GERD to GDP targets has become fashionable again at a much larger scale. This article is focused on assessing the effectiveness of this policy at an international level, by using a database purposefully built for this research based on information of 45 countries and 112 R&D intensity targets. The results show a consistent pattern of failure of this policy across countries and at country level, and only exceptionally a country was able to reach the intended R&D intensity targets. Governments have been promising much more than they are capable of delivering but, paradoxically, the popularity of the R&D intensity indictor remains high despite the complete lack of effectiveness of R&D policy based on R&D intensity targets.