R&D 및 불완전경쟁과 경제성장

R&D Activities, Imperfect Competition and Economic Growth

아이디어는 소멸하지 않으며 지식생산과정에 수확체감의 법칙이 작용하지도 않는다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 사적측면만을 고려하는 단순한 내생적 성장모형에서는 지속적 경제성장이 달성되지 않게 된다. 그러나, 지식자본의 비전유성을 고려하여 이를 공적자본으로 간주하게 되면 지속적 경제성장은 달성될 수 있게 된다. 우리 경제에 대한 실증분석 결과가 지식의 공적자본으로서의 성격을 강하게 뒷받침함을 확인할 수 있다. 즉, 제품혁신 생산함수에 대한 모든 함수형태에서 지식자본이 사적재화라는 귀무가설을 모두 기각할 수 있다. 이상의 결과로부터 우리 경제는 제품혁신을 통해 지속적 경제성장을 달성할 수 있다는 시사점을 얻을 수 있다.

Ideas do not become exhausted, and there are no diminishing returns in the creation of knowledge. Nonetheless, growth ultimately ceases in this simplest model of endogeneous innovation. The reasons are similar to those that are discussed in the context of the neoclassical model of capital accumulation. Even if the resource cost of creating new goods does not rise, the economic return to invention may decline as the number of available products increases. When the rate of return to R&D falls to the level of the discount rate, private agents cease to be willing to defer consumption in order to invest in product development. But, if we treat knowledge capital as a public capital considering of its non-appropriable benefits, economic growth can be sustained in the economy. Romer(1986) has pointed out that growth might be sustainable if the accumulation of knowledge is not subject to long-run diminishing returns. Actually Romer assumed diminishing returns in the production of private knowledge from available resources, but increasing returns in the production of output from labor and total (public and private) knowledge. His condition for the sustainability of long-run growth amounts to an assumption that the diminishing returns in the former activity do not outweigh the increasing returns in the latter. The Johansen(1988) cointegration test method is used for finding long-run equilibrium relationship between R&D input and the product innovation. Test results indicate the existence of cointegrating equation between each pair of regression variables including dependent variable in the knowledge production function. And, the signs of cointegrating vectors are well accord to the prediction of sustainable growth. In the empirical analysis, from all cases of the form for the knowledge production function, we could not reject the null hypothesis that R&D spillover effect is significant($H_{0}:\;{\gamma}=1$). In summary, we showed that considering goodness of fit of regression model, we can see that the empirical evidence is strongly in favor of the character of knowledge as the public knowledge capital. So, we can expect that by product innovation, economic growth can be sustained in the Korean economy.