Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This paper discusses the determinants of policy initiatives across EU Member States in the policy domain of R&D and innovation. In particular, this analysis verifies whether national governments react to past R&D performances by means of new policy initiatives aimed at supporting public R&D spending, private R&D investments and the supply of skilled human resources. In doing so, we exploit the detailed information on R&D spending provided by EUROSTAT and the original European Commission's MICREF database (October 2009 release), which track product market reforms over the period 2004-2008 for the 27 European Member States.