A politico-economic analysis of the European Union's R&D policy

This paper develops an open-economy growth model to analyze the growth and welfare effects of the European Union's R&D policy. In the case of independent countries, each national government chooses the level of government-funded research non-cooperatively and fails to internalize the spillover effects across countries. Consequently, government-funded research is underprovided. In an economic union, the central government budget causes the common-pool problem and leads to an overprovision of government-funded research. Within this framework, we find that although an economic union dominates independent countries in economic growth, the welfare domination is ambiguous. In particular, there is a critical degree of cross-country spillover above (below) which an economic union dominates (is dominated by) independent countries in social welfare.