Benchmarking government support for venture capital

Venture capital (VC) plays a pivotal role in funding the growth of innovative start-ups and SMEs, which are important drivers of productivity growth and job creation. This report presents recent trends in VC markets and compares the approaches to government VC policies across nine OECD countries: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The report shows that VC investment volumes have increased considerably over the last 15 years, driven by historically low interest rates. Government interventions in VC markets have also expanded and evolved, shifting towards approaches that include indirect investments (e.g. through a fund-of-fund investment model) and investments in later stages of business development, with a view to supporting more actively business scale-ups. The last section of the report covers the principal operational arrangements of government-backed VC, including how profits and losses are shared with private investors.