Economies of scale and scope in publicly funded biomedical and health research: evidence from the literature.
Economies of scale and scope in publicly funded biomedical and health research: evidence from the literature.
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DOI：
10.1186/s12961-016-0167-3
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发表时间：
2017-02-02
影响因子：
4
通讯作者：
Wooding S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hernandez-Villafuerte K;Sussex J;Robin E;Guthrie S;Wooding S
公共资助的生物医学和健康研究有望为纳税人和整个社会带来尽可能好的回报。因此，重要的是要知道这样的研究是集中在少数几个“研究小组”还是分散在许多研究小组中更有成效。我们对研究问题进行了系统的快速证据评估：生物医学和健康研究中是否存在规模经济和范围经济？换句话说，如果在一个地方进行更多或更广泛的研究，那么单位成本的研究是否更有成效？我们审查了截至2014年底的英语语言文献，没有日期限制。为了帮助我们对这些文献进行分类和理解，我们首先对计量经济学文献进行了回顾，这些文献讨论了一般研究（不限于生物医学和健康研究）中分析规模经济和/或范围经济的模型。我们发现了大量不同的文献。我们回顾了60项关于生物医学和健康研究的规模经济和/或范围经济的实证研究，或包括或重叠生物医学和健康研究的研究类别。这些文献在方法和结果上各不相同。在大学或研究所一级，研究往往表明生物医学和保健研究的规模经济效益大于规模不经济效益或规模收益不变。然而，所有这三个发现都存在于文献中，沿着倒U形关系。在单个研究单位、实验室或项目一级，研究数量较少，证据也参差不齐。关于范围经济，文献更多地表明积极的范围经济而不是不经济，但情况也是好坏参半。与规模效应相比，研究小组活动范围的变化所产生的效应较少得到报告，结果也较为复杂。由于缺乏支持或反对存在规模经济或范围经济的主要结论，这意味着在分配研究资金时仍然需要逐案决定，而不是采取将资金集中在少数中心或分散在许多中心的一般政策。
Publicly funded biomedical and health research is expected to achieve the best return possible for taxpayers and for society generally. It is therefore important to know whether such research is more productive if concentrated into a small number of ‘research groups’ or dispersed across many. We undertook a systematic rapid evidence assessment focused on the research question: do economies of scale and scope exist in biomedical and health research? In other words, is that research more productive per unit of cost if more of it, or a wider variety of it, is done in one location? We reviewed English language literature without date restriction to the end of 2014. To help us to classify and understand that literature, we first undertook a review of econometric literature discussing models for analysing economies of scale and/or scope in research generally (not limited to biomedical and health research). We found a large and disparate literature. We reviewed 60 empirical studies of (dis-)economies of scale and/or scope in biomedical and health research, or in categories of research including or overlapping with biomedical and health research. This literature is varied in methods and findings. At the level of universities or research institutes, studies more often point to positive economies of scale than to diseconomies of scale or constant returns to scale in biomedical and health research. However, all three findings exist in the literature, along with inverse U-shaped relationships. At the level of individual research units, laboratories or projects, the numbers of studies are smaller and evidence is mixed. Concerning economies of scope, the literature more often suggests positive economies of scope than diseconomies, but the picture is again mixed. The effect of varying the scope of activities by a research group was less often reported than the effect of scale and the results were more mixed. The absence of predominant findings for or against the existence of economies of scale or scope implies a continuing need for case by case decisions when distributing research funding, rather than a general policy either to concentrate funding in a few centres or to disperse it across many.