Heterogeneous effect of high-tech industrial R&D spending on economic growth

Empirical evidence has suggested that R&D investment is positively related to economic growth. This paper extends prior research by further examining the heterogeneous effects of R&D expenditures in the high-tech sector on economic growth. This study adopts a quantile regression approach to explore the marginal effect of R&D expenditures in the high-tech sector across different quantiles of the conditional GDP distribution for 23 OECD countries and Taiwan during 1991-2006. Empirical evidences show that the impacts of R&D expenditures in the high-tech sector are heterogeneous across levels of per capita income. High-tech industrial R&D spending has a strong positive effect on GDP per capita at the highest quantile of the distribution. However, all sectors' R&D spending relative to GDP is subject to significant negative returns only when considering the middle income countries. The study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the correlation between R&D investment and economic growth. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.