Presentation of SPINTAN project

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for
research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 612774
PUBLIC SECTOR INTANGIBLES
(SPINTAN project)
Funded by the Seventh Framework
Programme of the European Union
Matilde Mas
University of Valencia & Ivie

The SPINTAN project (Funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the
European Union) proposes to extend both the theoretical and the empirical
approach introduced by CHS (2005, 2009) including Public Sector intangibles
in different complementary directions.
Objectives:
1. Clarify the boundaries of the non-market economy; the concept of Public
Intangibles; their distribution by industries; and the conceptual problems
posed by the measurement of its capital services.
2. Build up a Public Sector Intangibles Database for a set (22) of EU
countries, supplemented by some big non-EU countries.
3. Analyze the impact of Public Sector intangibles on innovation,
well-being and “smart” growth.
4. Including Public Intangibles spillovers effects to the market sector
5. And analyze the consequences of austerity policies in view of the expected
recovery.
CONCEPT AND OBJECTIVES
2

CONSORTIUM MEMBERS
3
Name Short name Country
1 Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. Ivie Spain
2 National Institute of Economic and Social Research Lbg NIESR United Kingdom
3 LUISS Libera Universita Internaziolale Degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli LUISS Italy
4 Istituto nazionale di statistica Istat Italy
5 Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine IC United Kingdom
6 The Conference Board Inc TCBE United States
7 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD France
8 Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung Gmbh ZEW Germany
9 Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung E.V. DIW Germany
10 Wiener Institut für Interntionale Wirtschaftsvergleiche wiiw Austria
11 Fores (Forum för reformer och entreprenörskap) Stiftelse FORES Sweden
12 Kopint-tarki Konjunkturakutato Intezet Zrt Kopint Hungary
Associate partners
The Department of Industry of the Australian Government
The RIETI Institute and the Gakushuin University, Japan
Australia
Japan

• The estimates of Public Sector intangible investments will complement the
harmonized business intangible measures developed by INTAN-Invest
(Corrado, Haskel, Jona-Lasinio, Iommi, 2012).
• It will analyze key issues with regard to the boundaries of public intangibles
between different public and private categories, such as R&D, skill formation
and IT investment.
• It will also propose new ways to measure Public Sector intangible capital
services, and especially depreciation and the rate of return.
• The main objective of WP 1 & WP 2 is to settle on the most important
conceptual and methodological issues in measuring public intangibles, which
will lead to the construction of a database for 22 EU countries, United
States, China, India, and possibly Brazil.
BUILDING UP A PUBLIC SECTOR
INTANGIBLES DATABASE (WP 1 & WP2)
4

Provide an answer to key issues:
1. The role of Public Sector investment in general, and of Public Sector
investment in intangibles in particular, for generating long term “smart”
growth and for the competitiveness of the economies.
2. To what extent are public intangibles complementary or substitutes for
private intangibles.
3. How strong are the spillover effects from public intangibles
vis-à-vis private intangibles, creating benefits for growth beyond the
investor itself.
4. If investment in different kinds of intangibles is equally important in terms
of its impact on growth.
5. Relevance of Public Sector Intangibles in two key areas: Health and
Education (including Higher Education)
THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC SECTOR
INTANGIBLES (WP 3 & WP 4)
5

Five main research questions to be addressed:
1. Have the current crisis and the accompanying austerity measures adopted by
governments affected Public Sector investment intangibles in an even way?
2. Has intangible investment been impacted more (or less) by the crisis than
tangible investment? Have public and private intangible investments been
affected equally?
3. What has been the impact of austerity measures on growth and
competitiveness?
4. What are the expected consequences of the austerity policies on the path to
be followed in the subsequent recovery?
5. Will different segments of population be equally affected? Would they
enhance future growth and well-being?
CONSEQUENCES OF AUSTERITY
POLICIES IN VIEW OF THE EXPECTED RECOVERY
(WP 5)
6

WP 1 will address several methodological issues:
• Definition of intangible asset boundaries in the Public Sector. The CHS
approach was originally thought to identify intangible assets in the market
sector. Thus, some of the assets have a pure firm-specific character (brand
equity or new financial product developments), while other assets have both a
public and private component (R&D, education and health care, cultural
expenditures, IT infrastructure…).
• Identification of sector specific intangible expenditures with the help of
WP3 – WP5 research outputs
• Discussion of a crucial conceptual issue with regard to the rate of return on
public intangibles. In the current National Accounts framework the basic
assumption is that government capital has a net return of zero, which is clearly
unsatisfactory from both analytical and policy perspectives.
GENERAL OVERVIEW WP 1
7

WP 2 has the objective of constructing a database on intangible investment in
the Public Sector. Most of the recent methodological work on intangibles focused
on the measurement of intangible investment in the market sector (INNODRIVE,
COINVEST, INTAN-Invest, TCB & OECD).
The aim is to produce a cross-country harmonized database of Public Sector
intangibles coherent with the market sector estimates of intangibles developed
by INTAN-Invest, and also with EU KLEMS.
It will cover 22 EU countries plus the US, and some other countries (China, India
and possibly Brazil).
8

WP 3 will concentrate on two specific areas Health and Education.
The goal is that the main research questions address will help the
methodological discussion in WP 1.
Health analysis will take a macro and micro perspective
Education from four different perspectives:
• Link between spending on intangibles and different performance indicators
• Impact of intangibles on school performance in one country (UK) making use
of a newly released database;
• Contribution of higher education R&D investment to the improvement of a
set of socio-economic variables
• Measure the productivity of higher education institutions by looking at the
quality-adjusted output in terms of scientific publications and patents
associated with intangibles
9

• It will analyse the existing synergies between public intangibles and market
sector productivity performance and its impact on economic growth.
• Spillover effects will be carefully analyzed.
• It will formalize the implicit van Ark-Jaeger (2010) framework on
measurement of output elasticities.
• It will produce a case study for Italy which will analyze the relationship
between fiscal stimulus and business cycle taking into account the role of public
sector intangible capital.
• It will provide a case study for Spain analyzing public tangible (six different
types of infrastructures) and intangible capital as well as their spillovers over the
market sector performance.
• It will analyze the effects of international spillovers on public and private
intangibles based on international production linkages and making use of the
WIOD database
10

Five objectives:
1. Define a blueprint of a growth-friendly consolidation strategy;
2. Analyze the impact of austerity policies when complementarities between
tangibles and intangibles are present;
3. Analyze international linkages during the last economic cycle.
4. Review government spending (in both tangible and intangible investment) in
the New Member States;
5. Study the reaction of public ICT investment to economic crisis;
11

• It will present a comprehensive synthesis of the project highlighting its main
policy implications.
• It will provide a general diagnosis of the state of the EU countries in relation
with each of the topics analyzed
• and it will establish the main recommendations for improving their
performance.
• It will also include a policy note on the relation between business and
government on how to leverage the benefits from public and private intangibles.
12

INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE WORK PACKAGES
13
WP1:
Public Sector
Intangibles.
Methodological &
Measurement issues
(TCBE)
WP2:
Measuring Public
Sector Intangibles
– Database
[Harmonized cross
country database]
(LUISS)
WP3:
Education, Health and R&D: Impacts
on smart growth (NIESR)
WP4:
Spillovers from Public Sector
Intangibles (IC)
WP5:
Austerity and Recovery (Ivie)
WP6:
Synthesis and
Policy
Implications. (Ivie
& TCBE)
WP7: Management and Dissemination (Ivie)

SPINTAN is potentially of interest for the experts in the academic community
and its subject matter is highly placed on the European political agenda.
It can provide four critical elements:
• A coherent method
• A rigorous database for the main advanced and the emergent economies
• Analytical work that estimates the benefit of some public policies and the cost
of suppressing them;
• And critical work on policy making.
From a very early stage there is great emphasis put on the expected return to
society (Europe and beyond) from the public funding of this project.
More specifically, on how are the expected results from the SPINTAN project
going to improve policy making, the knowledge of the economies of the
countries involved and the everyday lives of people.
COOPERATION WITH THE
RESEARCH COMMUNITY
14

• The SPINTAN Web Page (www.spintan.net) offers updated information on the
ongoing project and activities related to the topic of intangibles
– A private Information Sharing section is dedicated to dissemination of internal
discussions on the conceptual framework in WP1 and the data collection in
WP2
• Find us also in Twitter!
@SPINTAN
JOIN US!
15

Presentation of SPINTAN project

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