The Big and the Small of Tax Support for R&D in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Innovation is critical in the knowledge-based economy. It is generally accepted that governments have an important role to play in promoting innovative activity and R&D. Both the federal and provincial governments in Canada provide tax subsidies, and other forms of support, for R&D. Changes to various programs offered by the federal government were introduced in Budget 2012, most particularly related to the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit program. This paper analyzes the state of tax subsidies for R&D both pre- and post-budget, and at both the federal and provincial level. It is shown that there is a patchwork of effective tax subsidy rates in Canada, which vary both between and within provinces, between small versus large firms, and across sectors and types of R&D activity. The result is a misallocation of R&D resources and a system of government support that is less effective than it could be. On some dimensions Budget 2012 was a move in the right direction, but on other dimensions matters were made worse, resulting in a reconfiguration of tax support across R&D activities that is more distortionary and less efficient. Most particularly, the post-budget tax system heavily favours small firms over large firms, and labour intensive R&D over capital intensive R&D. This paper offers a lucid examination of R&D tax support pre- and post-budget, and argues persuasively that Canadian governments should adopt a more uniform, less distortionary approach to tax subsidies for R&D if they are truly interested in setting innovation free.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".