Evaluation of Research and Innovation Funding
ResearchZEW and Stifterverband Build New Database to Analyse Public Funding Measures
The evaluation of government funding is essential for evidence-based, effective and efficient policymaking. On behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, ZEW Mannheim and the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany) are creating a high-quality database for the evaluation of German research and innovation funding as part of the new EVALDAT research project. An evaluation dataset is set to be made available by the end of 2025, representing a new milestone in the evaluation of public research and innovation funding in Germany.
The current standard is to use econometric evaluation methods to analyse the effects of government funding. A prerequisite for applying these methods is a database containing information about the supported entities, the type and amount of funding, the policy measures’ target variables, and the factors influencing the utilisation of the funding. This information should be made available over time and for a control group of entities that did not receive funding.
The project is divided into three main work packages:
- Identifying key funding programmes from the federal government, states, and the EU
- Linking funding data with the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP)
- Connecting the dataset with survey data from the Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP) and the survey on R&D in German firms by the Science Statistics of the Stifterverband
No uniform documentation of government funding
In some policy fields, such as labour market policy, high-quality databases already exist, facilitating the evaluation of political measures in those fields. However, the situation is different in the area of research and innovation funding for firms. Firstly, there is no uniform documentation of public funding, as it is provided by different entities at the federal, state, and EU levels. Secondly, many relevant variables of research and innovation funding are not covered by official firm statistics. These include the amount and composition of expenditures on R&D, as well as the impact of innovations on the firms’ profitability through the implementation of new products or cost reductions through process innovations.
Evaluation dataset
The dataset to be created in the EVALDAT project should cover funding from at least 2010 (potentially extending back to 2000) to the present and be structured as a panel dataset. By linking official funding data with structural data from the MUP, survey data on R&D and innovations from the MIP, and Stifterverband’s science statistics, a database will be established that can be used in a variety of programme evaluations. This dataset will be made available to both the academic research community and the project sponsors.
A significant challenge of the research project is establishing a uniform observation unit, “firms”, by methodically combining different observation units from the R&D survey (partly including firm groups, legal entities, businesses/jobs), the MIP (usually legal entities), and the funding data (partly including executing entities).
