Impact of public sector intangibles and their components on firms’ productivity (D7.3)

A well-functioning and dynamic public sector can be important for productivity. Existing literature has focused mainly public sector’s investment in tangibles, such as infrastructures, that can boost productivity in many ways, among which increasing the productivity of private inputs, reducing production and transport costs and encouraging specialization and competition. Less attention have been paid to intangible types of investment, which are also known to be an important source of economic growth. This paper examines the relation between public intangibles and business productivity, and whether there are complementarities between private sector and public sector investments in intangibles. The paper combines data from the EU SPINTAN project with private intangible investment data from INTAN-Invest and with other productive factors data from EU Klems to assess the impact of public intangibles of private productivity. The final panel dataset includes 19 European countries and 16 industries observed for 13 years, between 2000 and 2012.

See the paper here.