Abstract:

R&D activities play a significant role in firms’ innovation activities and competitiveness of firms and regions. Within this context, the issues related to R&D expenditures are of particular importance. This paper aims to investigate how intramural expenditures on R&D by types of costs incurred by firms, universities and regional policy actors differ in Poland at NUTS-2 level. Special concern was put on current and capital expenditure on R&D. The empirical evidence was based on data from Statistics Poland, Local Bank Data for the period 2004–2018 (except of 2008, due to missing data). The zero unitarization method and multivariate analysis were employed to hypothesis testing. This paper provides a contribution to the discussion on R&D activities in Poland. The findings reveal relatively high diversity between regions at NUTS-2 level in Poland in terms of current and capital expenditures on R&D incurred by firms, universities and regional policy actors. The results indicates also perpetual changes in level of intramural expenditures on R&D in the most of Polish regions at NUTS-2 level. A policy implication is that regional policy actors should strengthen R&D policy in order to stimulate R&D activities and enhance firms’ and regions’ competitiveness.