The SPINTAN project carries out innovative research on intangible public investments financed by the European Commission, in which the LUISS Lab for European Economics plays a major role. At the beginning of January, the coordinator for the LUISS team on the project, Cecilia Jona-Lasinio, participated in the annual conference of the American Economic Association to present the first results of their work before the international scientific community.
"SPINTAN stands for Smart Public Intangibles and its primary goal is to analyze the role of intangible goods in public administration and study the interactions between the public and private sector that generate positive effects on economic growth," says the researcher. "By intangible goods, we mean investments that are aimed at reorganizing and managing public administration more efficiently, like public investments in research and development, aside from training and organizational capital."
Participating in the project are eleven European institutions, one of which is the OECD. "In the first phase, the work focuses on measuring investments in intangible goods, an estimate that has never been done before in the literature. Up to now, we have worked closely with the Conference Board in New York to estimate investments in intangible goods for 15 European countries as well as the United States. In the near future we plan to extend the measurement to 22 European countries as well as China, Brazil and India."
In collaboration with the colleagues of the Conference Board and the Imperial College of London, Jona-Lasinio has presented the results of the first year of research at the conference of Boston. "The presentation was made before an international, qualified and diverse audience, which noted, among others, Leonard Nakamura, the vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and father of the economic theory that our research is based on. All of those present grasped the originality and the potential of our work both respect to the role of intangibles as new sources of economic growth and for the significant policy implications."
The next step involves the publication of a work on the methodologies for measuring intangible investments in the public sector and on the first empirical results, which will be presented at the conference for the first half of the project. "In the spring we will have a Midterm Meeting hosted by NIESR in London (another of the institutes participating in the project) where we will define methods of measuring immaterial goods. In the meantime, the production of estimates goes on and for April we will have the entire historical series, from 1995 to 2013, for all of the European countries included in the project. Following that, we will launch the first formalized studies on the interaction between the public and private sector and the first verifications will emerge on the actual existence of spillover effects between the public and private sector."
The aim is to revolutionize the framework of the sources of growth on which our economic system is based. "Once the contribution of intangible assets to growth was quantified and analyzed, in the final phase of the project, we will try to formalize the impact and the implications of our findings on possible economic policy choices. The objective will be to provide suggestions for economic policy for the growth agenda of the European Commission, taking into account the growing interest that the analysis of new sources of growth is attracting overseas. Like, for example, at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, where they have been engaged in the analysis of these topics already for some time."