With trade barriers rising, the time is right to refresh the evidence that openness to trade comes with substantial benefits. This column focuses on the complementarity between R&D and foreign sourcing. Looking at Norwegian firms from 1997 to 2005, it argues that one fifth of productivity growth came from sourcing more foreign products, while the remaining four fifths came from technical change.

The European Parliament is currently in talks over new ways to fund research. This column argues that unless the current proposal is changed, funding for research in social sciences will almost completely disappear from the main ‘cooperative research’ (now ‘Societal Challenges’) programme.

US healthcare costs are under scrutiny. Americans have spent billions of dollars on cancer research in recent decades. Has it paid off? This column says that investments in cancer research and development have been quite worthwhile – producing a value to society far in excess of costs.

How will proposed increases in energy R&D funding affect other types of R&D spending? This column provides evidence that should dampen concerns about crowding out – increased R&D in response to policies designed to enhance clean-energy innovation most likely comes at the expense of R&D in dirty-energy technologies.

European innovators are increasingly turning to complex patent filing strategies. This column shows that such strategies pay off in patent value. But are applicants strategically abusing the filing process or turning to these methods because the current system does not meet their legitimate needs? Either symptom warrants reform.

Patent-based measures of innovation are often accused of reflecting the propensity to patent rather than actual research productivity. This column presents a better measure of patenting that reflects research productivity and identifies policies that affect research productivity and the propensity to patent.

Europe isn’t increasing its R&D intensity. Professor Pottelsberghe, former Chief Economist of the European Patents Office, identifies why Europe is missing its targets and looks to the R&D leaders – the US and Sweden – for policy lessons.

No climate-change strategy will work unless it is consistent with developing countries' continued growth. So curbing emissions requires cheaper clean energy than is currently available. And that requires innovation.

Patent applications are booming, but many seem to be of low quality and/or strategically manipulated to hide the real invention within a myriad of claims. This delays the patent-granting process and hinders the system's ultimate goal of balancing incentives for knowledge creation with knowledge dissemination. Here are some ideas on how to fix the problem.

Data on a thousand European firms show that an extra euro of R&D spending raises their 'Tobin's q' by 0.7 euros. R&D reporting, however, is not required in most European nations, so financial markets may be failing to properly value and thus reward innovative investments. One step towards the ‘knowledge economy’ would be to require Europe’s publicly-listed firms to disclose their R&D.