R&D is a main driver of growth, whether by generating new ideas for production or increasing technological transfer. However, R&D itself is risky and faces numerous barriers which may reduce its marginal return. Direct R&D subsides are intended to counteract such barriers, but whether they lead empirically to increased economic growth is unclear. In our structural model of the UK, subsidies o¤set the frictional costs associated with R&D, incentivising innovation and so stimulating productivity growth. We estimate and test this structural model by indirect inference, a method not previously used in work on R&D. We …nd that even temporary cuts to R&D funding have long-lasting impacts on UK economic growth. The power of the test allows us to calculate tight accuracy bounds for our results and for policy reform impacts calculated using the model. These …ndings are of high relevance to the ongoing debate around the future UK innovation environment.

China's development policy since 1978 has differed across regions. With rapid aggregate growth has come widening regional inequality. The 1994 fiscal decentralisation reforms shifted political pressure onto provincial officials to boost local growth through local public investments. These investments affect regional convergence by counteracting regulatory frictions in factor accumulation, and can also determine steady-state growth. However, the effect of public spending allocations across physical and human capital on growth and convergence processes is empirically unexplored for Chinese provinces. We take provincial time-series data on public spending by category, finding local public spending and its components augment convergence rates differently across regions. Spending on education and health contributes significantly more to growth and convergence than capital spending, confirming that the public capital-spending bias is not a local growth-optimising strategy. We suggest a policy of aligning local government promotion incentives to human capital targets to correct local resource misallocation.

This paper investigates the potential for a causal relationship between certain supplyside policies and UK output and productivity growth between 1970 and 2009. We outline an open economy DSGE model of the UK in which productivity growth is determined by the tax and regulatory environment faced by firms. This model is estimated and tested using simulation-based econometric methods (indirect inference). Using Monte Carlo methods we investigate the power of the test as we apply it, allowing the construction of uncertainty bounds for the structural parameter estimates and hence for the quantitative implications of policy reform in the estimated model. We also test and confirm the model's identification, thus ensuring that the direction of causality is unambiguously from policy to productivity. The results offer robust empirical evidence that temporary changes in policies underpinning the business environment can have sizeable effects on economic growth over the medium term.