Measuring Tax Support for R&D and Innovation

‌

Highlights | Indicators | Measurement

In addition to direct support measures such as grants, governments worldwide increasingly rely on tax incentives to promote business R&D and encourage innovation and economic growth. Since 2007, the OECD has been developing measurement and data infrastructures to provide qualitative and statistical evidence on the use, cost and impacts of R&D tax incentives.

Latest news, March 2023: With the release of the 2022 edition of OECD R&D Tax Incentives database, the OECD has launched the OECD INNOTAX portal – a new thematic portal on R&D tax incentives, hosted by the OECD-EC STIP Compass policy database. This new and interactive OECD tool aims to provide a single point of access to resources in this area and facilitate policy analysis and comparison of national schemes based on their design features, drawing on the contributions of OECD countries and partner economies to the annual R&D tax incentives survey.

Direct government funding and tax support for business R&D, 2020
As a percentage of GDP

Source: OECD R&D Tax Incentives Database, January 2023 | Data and notes (.xlsx)

The new OECD INNOTAX portal provides the most up-to-date internationally comparable information on the design, administration and role of R&D tax incentives in the innovation policy mix of OECD countries and partner economies in 2022, focussing on expenditure-based R&D tax incentives available at central government level over the 2000-2022 period. Key features and components of the new and interactive OECD tool include:

Interactive, cross country visualisations that provide a summary overview of the main design features of R&D tax incentives and common R&D tax relief adminstration models in the OECD area and beyond, and allow users to identify, view and compare the underlying R&D tax incentive schemes featuring in each visualsation.
A sophisticated interactive tool with smart filtering that facilitates policy discovery, analysis and comparison, including the retrieval of R&D tax incentive schemes with similar design features. This tool allows users to more easily search, access and compare the design and implementation related information previously published in the OECD Compendium of Information on R&D tax incentives.
Country pages that describe the design and administration of national R&D tax incentive schemes, including recent policy developments. As online version of the previous edition of OECD R&D tax incentive country profiles, these pages further highlight recent and long-term trends in the generosity, cost and uptake of R&D tax relief, drawing on the latest indicators from the OECD R&D Tax Incentives database.
The indicators and analysis page that provides an overview of some key outputs of the OECD measurement and analytical work on R&D tax incentives and links to related OECD work in this area.

COUNTRY PROFILES - 2021 edition

Click here for general and country-specific notes on the B-index time-series estimates contained in the 2021 edition of OECD R&D tax incentive country profiles.
Visit the new OECD INNOTAX portal to access the online 2022 edition of OECD R&D tax incentives country profiles.

information on the Design and scope of R&D tax incentives

microBeRD: an OECD study on the impact of R&D tax incentives

The OECD is working on a micro-data project which applies a “distributed” approach to the empirical analysis of micro-data. The OECD microBeRD project project investigates and models the incidence and impact of public support for business R&D in collaboration with national experts with access to confidential R&D and public support micro-data. This approach facilitates a co-ordinated statistical analysis of the impact of tax relief design features and their interaction with direct forms of public R&D funding by exploiting variation in support within and across countries.

OECD publications, working papers and policy papers on R&D tax incentives