MORE EVIDENCE ON THE UNDERCOUNTING OF SMALL FIRM RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT

Drawing from the SEO national survey on R&D and innovation in The Netherlands, we argue that there must be an underrecording of small-scale R&D by orders of magnitude in the R&D survey by the Dutch Central Statistical Office. Such underrecording holds for manufacturing and (even more so) for service firms. This finding is confirmed by estimates based on records of firms receiving R&D subsidies which we use as a third independent source. In order to allow for international comparability of R&D data, the survey methods of the Dutch Central Statistical Office are similar to those in other OECD countries. Therefore, our findings in the Dutch manufacturing and service industries are likely to have an impact for the measurement of R&D in other OECD countries. The results have implications for our judgement about the famous "Schumpeterian hypotheses" concerning the influence of firm size and market structure on R&D.