Multi-level innovation policy in southern EU countries.An additionality evaluation of the Italian and Spanish public interventions

The present paper aims to analyse the innovation policies implemented in Italy and Spain. It adopts a multi-level perspective to investigate the effects induced by regional and national public supports and a multi-dimensional approach to disentangle the different types of additionality impacts on firms’ innovation process. In particular input, output and behavioural additionality are considered. The results, obtained through a propensity score matching estimation of the average treatment effect on treated (ATT) implemented on CIS 4 microdata, capture a complex picture. In both the countries only national policies increase R&D investment. As for output additionality, whereas Spanish regional and national policies enhance the economic exploitation of new products and patent applications, Italian interventions boost only process innovation. As for the behavioural additionality, mixed evidences emerge for regional Italian policies, for which some negative effects are also found, Italian national interventions positively affect interactions with other firms and research partners, Spanish policies (both national and regional) induce funded firms to engage in formal training and to interact more with business and research partners. A tentative analysis of the “risk of policy failure†is also provided. Apart from Italian regional policies, for which no significant result is found, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients reveal that the (rank of the) ATT calculated for each additionality measure is negatively related to the (rank of the) corresponding coefficient of variation. High TTs are thus correlated with low dispersions.