THE POLITICAL-ECONOMY OF RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT TAXONOMIES

This paper evaluates the merits of five different taxonomies for R&D budgeting and reporting. The five are: (1) the long time "standard" - basic-applied-development-test-evaluation, (2) the DOD's development-oriented taxonomy, (3) the General Accounting Office simplified two category taxonomy, (4) the new British taxonomy for applied research, and (5) a recently proposed variant of "standard" that adds a new sponsor-directed category between basic and applied. There are four evaluation criteria: (1) informational; (2) effective budgeting; (3) policy formulation; and (4) political persuasion. Informational criteria refer to the quality, quantity, and costs of information acquisition and access. Effective budgeting criteria concern the ability of a taxonomy to facilitate getting as much R&D output as possible for given levels of budget and to help choose good trajectories of research over time. Policy formulation criteria refer to promotion of serious public policy debate about S&T issues, neutrality when used by adversaries and advocates in policy debate, and deterrence of reflexive arguments about the value of the taxonomy being used. Political persuasion criteria concern such things as the ability to hold old constituencies and create new ones, the ability to avoid too much blame for hard allocation decisions, the ability to convince research sponsors to allow agency requested levels and distributions. The evaluation reveals no clear dominance among taxonomies and suggests R&D agencies need new taxonomies less than they need a rapid response capability to array budgets, obligations, and outlays in terms meaningful to different sponsors and audiences. © 1991.