Análisis de incentivos tributarios a la I+D: el caso de Argentina frente a otros países de la región.

Abstract

Interest in the evaluation of science, technology, and innovation programs, institutions, and public policies has been growing since the advent of democracy in Argentina in 1983. This is primarily due to concern about the evaluation procedures used in the allocation of funds by public agencies and the growing demand from society and the political system to evaluate the effects of scientific and technological policies and programs. In Argentina, as Codner et al. (2015) note, historically, the majority of the financial effort allocated to research, both basic and applied, and technological development has been carried out by the public sector. As Del Bello (2014) notes, Law 23,877 for the Promotion and Development of Technological Innovation was enacted in 1990, while the Argentine Technology Fund (FONTAR) was established in 1994, and the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Promotion was created in 1996. These have been the main milestones or starting points in the institutional transformation of public policy to promote innovation and technological development. The same author then indicates that since 2005, resources supporting innovation have expanded, while promotional instruments have diversified, specifically since 2007, continuing this cycle of consolidation and deepening to the present. The main promotional instruments used have been, on the one hand, the granting of credit financing lines, on the other, tax credit certificates, and, finally, non-refundable contributions known as ANRs. All of this has been achieved through different fund variants, such as the aforementioned FONTAR, but which have expanded sectorally in recent years. Beyond the potential contributions of this type of program, it is important to analyze other tax benefits that can be granted in Argentina and that are already being applied in other countries, which is the subject of this paper. For example, many developed countries have implemented technology policies aimed at promoting private investment in R&D, where one of the most widely used instruments is the application of tax incentives. It is also important to note that, internationally, there is a constant search for new policy instruments and the review and improvement of those currently in use, given the accelerated process of change driven by the so-called "knowledge society or economy." Therefore, it is useful to understand the "state of the art" in taxation for innovation, in order to have new tools that would be potentially useful for government innovation policy, particularly for the SME sector, a sector that frequently faces serious difficulties regarding operational financing and access to credit for larger investments. Within this framework, the general objective of this paper is to contribute to the evaluation of public policy instruments supporting technological innovation for SMEs and businesses in general in our country, based on an analysis of the tax benefits provided in our national legislation and, in some way, comparing them with other Latin American countries. In other words, this paper aims to analyze the trajectories of tax benefit policies supporting technological innovation in SMEs in a selected group of Latin American countries, specifically Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay.