I’ve written a working paper about the long-term decline in the research and development intensity of the UK’s economy, which has just been published on the website of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute here. It brings together many of the themes I’ve been writing about on this blog in the last few years. Here is its introduction.
Technological innovation is one of the major sources of long-term economic growth in developed economies. Since 1945 countries like the UK have enjoyed a remarkable run of sustained growth and improvement of living standards, associated with the widespread uptake of new technologies – cars and aircraft, consumer goods, computers and communication devices, effective new medicines, all underpinned by the development of new materials, chemicals and electronics. Now the UK is undergoing its deepest and most persistent period of slow or no growth for more than a hundred years. Is there any connection between this growth crisis and innovation – or lack of it?
The UK is a much less research and development intensive economy than it was thirty years ago, and is less R&D intensive than most of its rivals; this R&D deficit is most prominent in applied research funded and carried out in the business sector, and in government funded strategic research. Innovation can and does happen without research and development as understood in its conventional sense; innovation through organisational change and novelty in marketing, often using existing technology in new ways, can make significant contributions to economic growth. But at the technological frontier the development of new products and processes requires targeted investment of people and resources, and it is the capacity to make such efforts that is lost as research and development capabilities are run down. This loss of innovative capacity is not an accident; it is a direct consequence of the changing nature of the UK’s political economy. In the private sector, a growing structural trend to short-termism driven by the excessive financialisation of the economy, and an emphasis on “unlocking shareholder value”, has led to an abandonment of more long-ranged applied research. The privatisation of sectors such as energy has brought these pressures for short-termism into areas previously thought of as of strategic importance for the state. Together, these factors have led to the systematic liquidation of a significant part of the national infrastructure – both public and private – for applied and mission-oriented research.
Research and development are global activities; the benefits of new technologies developed in one part of the world diffuse across national boundaries, so R&D needs to be considered in a global as well as a national context. The declining R&D intensity of the UK displays in the most acute form a wider problem –
highly financialised market-centred capitalism, while it is it is good at delivering some types of incremental, consumer focused innovation, doesn’t favour more radical innovation which requires larger investments over longer time horizons. We currently are seeing serious global slowdowns in innovation in the pharmaceutical sector and in energy sectors. The former is a particular problem for the UK, because has a strong specialization in the pharmaceutical sector. The slowdown in energy innovation is a problem for everybody on the planet.
The example of energy illustrates why the development of new technology is so important. We depend existentially on technology, to deliver the cheap and abundant energy that our economies depend on, for example. But the technology we have isn’t good enough; the cost of extracting fossil fuels from the earth rises as the most accessible reserves are exhausted, and the consequences for the stability of the earth’s climate of burning fossil fuels become ever more apparent. We need better technologies not just to ensure the continuously rising living standards we’ve come to expect, but also because if we don’t replace our currently unsustainable technologies with better ones living standards will fall.
We should not be fatalistic about a slowing down of innovation in crucial technology areas, either nationally or globally. The slowing down of innovation isn’t a consequence of some unalterable law of nature, nor is it because we have already “taken the low-hanging fruit”. Innovation is slowing down because we have collectively chosen to devote fewer resources to developing it. We need as a society to recognize the problem, recognize that current policy for innovation isn’t delivering, and take responsibility for changing the current situation.
The rest of the paper can be downloaded here.