Innovation, research and the UK’s productivity crisis (the shorter version)

I have a much shorter version of my earlier three-part series (PDF version here) on the connection between the UK’s weak and worsening R&D performance and its current productivity standstill on HEFCE’s blog: Innovation, research and the UK’s productivity crisis.

The same piece has also been published on the blog of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute: Continuing on our current path of stagnating productivity and stagnating innovation isn’t inevitable: it’s a political choice, and it also appears on the web-based economics magazine Pieria.

The longer and more detailed post also formed the basis for my written evidence to the House of Commons Business Innovation and Skills Select Committee, which is currently inquiring into the productivity problem: On productivity and the government’s productivity plan (PDF).

Finally, here’s another graphical representation of the productivity problem in historical context, using the latest version of the Bank of England’s historical dataset “Three centuries of macroeconomic data”. It shows the total growth in hourly labour productivity over the preceding seven years; on this measure the current productivity slow-down is worse than that associated with two world wars and a great depression.

7yearproductivity_blog

Seven year growth in hourly labour productivity. Data from Hills, S, Thomas, R and Dimsdale, N (2015) “Three Centuries of Data – Version 2.2”, Bank of England.

The wrong direction

How does the UK compare with other leading research intensive economies, and how has its relative position changed in recent years? The graph above is an attempt to answer both questions graphically, separating out the contributions of both the public sector and the private sector to the overall R&D intensity of the economy as a proportion of GDP, and illustrating the trajectories of this expenditure since 2008. The UK stands out as having begun the period with a weak R&D performance, and since then it has gone in the wrong direction.

Govt vs Industry GERD timev2

Plotting both the private sector and public sector contributions to national R&D efforts stresses that there is a positive correlation between the two – public sector R&D tends to “crowd in” private R&D spending (1). Across the OECD on average, the private sector spends roughly twice as much on R&D as does the public sector, though in East Asian countries the private sector does more. The UK is substantially less R&D intensive than major competitors, and both public and private sectors contribute to this weak performance.

We can see some different trajectories in recent years. China and Korea stand out by their large increases in both private sector and public sector R&D intensity. Continue reading “The wrong direction”