Page 10 - IDEA Studie 07 2023 TACR

ARE SUBSIDIES TO BUSINESS R&D EFFECTIVE? REGRESSION
DISCONTINUITY EVIDENCE FROM THE TA CR ALFA PROGRAMME IDEA 2023
The ALFA programme
In the Czech Republic, direct support for R&D in business enterprises through subsidies awarded on a competitive basis has traditionally been a prominent tool of innovation policy. Direct R&D subsidies have been provided by a variety of programmes since the early 1990s, including ALFA, which is the focal point of this study. A system of indirect support for R&D in the form of tax deductions was introduced in 2005 and gradually grew in volume, but never accounted for more than half of the total support for business R&D (CZSO, 2022).
The ALFA programme was administered by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR) and provided funding to projects during the period 2011–2018. The TA CR was established in 2009 with the aim to consolidate funding for applied research and innovation, and ALFA was its first flagship programme. In total, ALFA provided funding of 9.3 billion CZK (approximately 340 million EUR) financed exclusively from the national budget, which makes it the second largest programme of this kind to date. Other similar major programmes include IMPULS (2004–2010), TIP (2009–2017) and TRIO (2016–2022), administered by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, and EPSILON (2015–2026) and TREND (2020–2027), which superseded ALFA at the TA CR (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, 2022).
ALFA was organized in four annual calls for proposals that took place in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The calls are dated by the year in which the call was announced, which is denoted as base year “t” in this paper. The calls were announced and proposals evaluated during the same year, and funding was provided from January of the following year. One exception to this was the last call, in which the funding started from July, rather than January, of the year following the year of the announcement. The primary target group was business enterprises, but research organizations were also eligible for funding. Theprogramme allowed for proposals from both individual entities and consortia of several partners. The participation of research organizations in consortia was rewarded by extra points in the evaluation in order to promote public-private collaboration. A typical proposal, therefore, consisted of a consortium headed by a firm, with a research organization and possibly other firms as partners.
The main objectives of ALFA were defined quite broadly: to boost performance of business enterprises, to increase competitiveness in the economy and the society, and to enhance the standard of living (TA CR, 2010, 2022). The programme was divided into three
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