R&D Spillovers: A Non-Spatial and a Spatial Examination

In recent years there were many debates and different opinions <br/>whether R&D spillover effects exist or not. In 1995 Coe and Helpman published <br/>a study about this phenomenon, based on a panel dataset, that supports <br/>the position that such R&D spillover effects are existent. However, this <br/>survey was criticized and many different suggestions for improvement came <br/>from the scientific community. Some of them were selected and analysed and <br/>finally led to a new model. And even though this new model is well compatible <br/>with the data, it leads to different conclusions, namely that there does <br/>not exist an R&D spillover effect. These different results were the motivation <br/>to run a spatial analysis, which can be done by considering the countries as <br/>regions and using an adequate spatial link matrix. The used methods from <br/>the field of spatial econometrics are described briefly and quite general, and <br/>finally the results from the spatial models (the ones which correspond to the <br/>non-spatial ones) are compared with the results from the non-spatial analysis. <br/>The preferred model supports the position that R&D spillover effects exist.