私人投资、研发和欧洲结构与投资基金：挤入还是挤出？

Private investment, R&D andEuropeanStructural andInvestmentFunds: crowding-in or crowding-out? Roberto A. De Santis, Francesca Vinci Disclaimer:Thispaper should not be reported as representing theviews of the European Central Bank(ECB). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB. Abstract We employ a novel regional dataset on European private investment and businessR&D spanning the years 2000 to 2021, along with comprehensive historical data onEuropean Union Structural and Investment (ESI) funds, to estimate whether ESIfunds have crowding-in or crowding-out effects on private investment and businessR&D. Our analysis, leveraging regional variation and a fiscal instrument immune toregion-specific shocks, reveals a significant crowding-in effect, with 1 euro in ESI fundsincreasing private investment by 1.1 euros and business R&D by 0.1 euros after twoyears. The effect is stronger in developed regions for private investment and in lessdeveloped regions for R&D. Additionally, crowding-in effects are stronger in regionswhere corporate private debt is relatively higher.Among the different ESI funds,the Cohesion Fund (CF) shows the largest estimated impact, while the EuropeanRegional Development Fund (ERDF) yields somewhat smaller but statistically morerobust results. Keywords:EU, Structural and Investment Funds, Private Investment, R&D, fiscal instruments. JEL Codes:E22, H54, O38, O52, R11, R58 Non-technical summary Europe faces substantial investment needs, and a strong complementarity between the pub-lic and private sectors could be crucial in effectively addressing these challenges.The debateover whether public expenditures crowd out or crowd in private investment shifts towards un-derstanding how public investments influence private investments. Crowding-out can occur if the supply of input (e.g.scientists) is inelastic; in this case,an increase in public investment comes at the expense of declines in private investment (e.g.,as fewer scientists would be available for private projects).Moreover, it occurs when publicinterventions substitute private capital, reducing incentives to invest for firms. Similarly, thereare several reasons for crowding-in to prevail, stemming from complementarities across publicand private capital. First, in the presence of large fixed costs, public investment in technology,innovation and infrastructure may make marginal projects feasible. The typical examples arethe construction of a road with public resources and the subsequent private initiative that suchprojects would enable. Second, there could be “spillover effects”, where new technologies finddifferent applications in the private sector. Third, credit constraints on the private sector maylimit the financing of projects without government support. Recent studies have shown that certain public investments, such as defence-related R&D,can indeed crowd in private investment.Our research broadens this analysis to include non-defence public investments, specifically through the European Structural and Investment (ESI)Funds, which aim to enhance economic cohesion across the European Union (EU). These fundsfocus on innovation, research, and infrastructure, raising the question of whether they encourageprivate investment or crowd it out by substituting private capital. We employ a novel regional dataset on private investment and business R&D and createan instrument for ESI disbursements that is unaffected by regional shocks.The instrumentleverages the correlation between planned and actual disbursements and the average absorptionrate for similar regions with comparable convergence objectives in other countries. During the 2000-2021 sample period, our findings indicate a significant crowding-in effect,with each euro of ESI funds causing an increase of 1.1 euros in private investment and 0.1euros in business R&D after two years.The crowding-in effect is stronger in more developedregions for private investment, while it is more prevalent in less developed regions for businessR&D. Moreover, we find that the crowding-in effects of ESI funds are stronger in regions withhigher corporate private debt, as these funds contribute to improving access to external finance. The crowding-in effect does not appear to be dependent on the business cycle, although it ismarginally higher during low-growth regimes, especially for business R&D. The findings also indicate that the European funds distributed via the European RegionalDevelopment Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF) significantly stimulate private sectorinitiatives by financing innovation, research, and infrastructure projects. In contrast, the sta-tistical outcomes for the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Youth Employment Initiative(YEI) are less definitive. Our study contributes to the literature on fiscal spillovers in the EU, offering valuableinsights for policymakers interested in effective public investment strategies.We