The fields of science and technology have a tendency to emphasize increasingly the importance of the role of a nation in the contexts of internationalization and neo-liberalism. The essential backgrounds have been caused by the correlation between tec...
The fields of science and technology have a tendency to emphasize increasingly the importance of the role of a nation in the contexts of internationalization and neo-liberalism. The essential backgrounds have been caused by the correlation between technological innovation and economic growth. The major advanced countries have announced the mid-long term research and development(R&D) investment plans such as American Competitiveness Initiatives(ACI) in 2006 and renewed Lisbon Strategy in 2005. The total R&D investment in Korea has been quickly increased from the mid of 1980s although it was shrank due to the IMF economic crisis. The expenditure scale of R&D budget entered the ten billions era in 2008 and will be planning KRW 19.1 trillion according to the National Mid-Term Fiscal Plan for 2010-2014. As being rapidly augmented the investment scale of R&D budget, investment efficiency and optimal spending level of R&D budget has continuously been a hot issue. However, I think that we neglected not only the theoretical modeling and but the empirical analysis on the investment scale of R&D budget with reviewing the previous studies related to R&D budget. Therefore, in many cases, the studies have been dependent on qualitative opinions of experts to predict the scale of expenditure from the R&D budgets in the process of drafting the National Science and Technology Basic Plans. Or ambiguously, it was generally considered that the R&D budgets should be invested consistently because they are an important driving force in creating future economic growth. There is a high possibility of the overlapped and extravagant spending of the R&D budget.
From this recognition, this study conducted an empirical analysis on the determinants of R&D budget and investigated the current status on its size of spending. A Simultaneous Equation Model (SEM) was constructed as a framework of analyzing the determinants of R&D budget according to the integrative approach which includes both the determinant approach and the incremental approach of budgetary decision making. Since the SEM was over-identified, it estimated by the Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) which is most widely used. The result of empirical analysis showed that the critical determinants were the president's volition and the incremental factor in the R&D expenditure per person and the ratio of government budget versus R&D budget. Particularly, by comparing the standardized coefficient between these two determinants, it showed that the scale of expenditure of the R&D budget had greater influence on the incremental factors than the president’s volition. Moreover, as a result of making additional incremental analysis, although the size of total expenditure of R&D budget was the greatest and very intensive in the 2000s aspect, the policy-makers willpower to augment the R&D budget was found to be much more significant in the 1990s. The inflation ratio also had positive impact on the increase of the expenditure size of the R&D budget, whereas the political factor, the election, was not influenced. In other words, the political business cycle was not applicable to the fiscal field of R&D budget. Meanwhile, the R&D budget was not directly influenced by the endogenous variables: private R&D investment and GDP. The R&D budget not only had direct impact on the GDP but also created a crowding-in effect with the expenditure size of the private R&D budget in a certain time lag. Therefore, it was found that it contributed to the increase of GDP indirectly. This result is different to Kim and Oh(2004)’ argument, due to exogenous attributes and the measurement method on the expenditure size of R&D budget. The exogenous attributes are beginning to be emphasized conspicuously according to the 577 Strategy of Myung-Bak Lee’s administration that stated the investment goal until 2012 on the National Mid-Term Fiscal Plans for 2010-2014. These exogenous attributes explains the reason behind the insensibility of public R&D investment on the cyclical fluctuation.
The analysis on the current status of the R&D budget was approached from three aspects of allocation-implementation-performance. From the allocation aspect, it showed that the government consistently kept the guidelines of expanding R&D budgets. However, there were many points of improvement in its implementation. For example, in the last 5 years, the participation of large companies on the National R&D program was 2.2 fold higher than the participation of the small and medium venture companies. Therefore, it was required to expand and to prepare multimodal plans to expand the participation small and medium venture companies and to diversify its investment. In case of the Information Technology (IT) field in Korea, the R&D investments of the government sector and the private sector are induced competitively; therefore, it requires R&D allocation system should be transformed into the advanced country type which is focused on the basic research. The investment efficiency was still lacking in terms of accomplishments. Furthermore, as a result of analyzing the trade-off on the military and social welfare spending of the R&D budget using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, the R&D budget has been increased regardless of the size of military and social welfare expenditure. In considering this result with the result from aforementioned empirical analysis, it is implied that the president’s volition was consistently reflected on the size of expenditure of the R&D budget. This was also verified by the ARIMA model that the decision-making of R&D budget in Korea is considerably described by the incrementalism.
However, the empirical analysis and the current status analysis have limitations of overlooking how the R&D budget determines the expenditure size substantially. To complement this limitation, a qualitative analysis was conducted on the R&D budget compliant system. This qualitative analys