Indirect industrial effects from space investments

Many impact assessments have been carried out to evaluate the economic and social effects of public investments in space. This paper focuses on ex post analyses of indirect industrial (intra-firm) effects, a sub-type of the impact assessments. A number of existing country-wide analyses report the ratio of the indirect industrial effects deriving from space-related contracts to the value of the space-related contracts placed with companies by governmental agencies (in Europe, mostly by the European Space Agency). This ratio is a widely accepted measure of the economic impact of the space contracts. The aim of this paper is to assess the usefulness of the ratio, a spin-off multiplier, for international benchmarking of the efficiency of space investments. The paper is the first attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of the methodological foundations of different country-wide studies on the spin-off multiplier performed in Europe. The country-wide studies have formulated different metrics and relied on different approaches to gathering quantitative data. The current paper discusses data quality issues that may result in a biased estimate of the spin-off multiplier. Data gathering techniques used in the studies tend to result in overestimated economic benefits. Even though the values of the spin-off multipliers are high in countries like Norway or Denmark, the confidence interval of the estimates is wide. The paper discusses time considerations to be taken into account for a standardized ratio as there is a time lag of several years until research and development becomes operative. Despite several methodological limitations, measuring the indirect industrial effects is a valuable tool for governments, especially for smaller ESA member states, as such studies can be implemented at low cost and provide information on spillovers from space programmes.