Financiamento público à I&D empresarial em Portugal

The will to foster a knowledge-based economy has led many countries, including Portugal, to a greater compromise with public policies to stimulate business R&D. The general trend to design policies in accordance with the political goals set for business R&D intensity is the visible expression of the mission that governments have accepted to that end. Recent changes in the public policies to foster business R&D raise or revive issues at different levels that deserve a critical analysis that is not taking place, namely in Portugal. This paper makes a contribution to the discussion about the role and the limits of the public policies to stimulate business R&D by estimating the weight of the public support of business R&D in Portugal and analyzing its evolution from 1997 to 2010. There has been a sustained growth of the public funding of business R&D as percentage of GDP over the period that reached 0.13% in 2009; as a percentage of BERD, the evolution has been irregular but the level of support has been quite high, sometimes over 18%.