An analysis of the impact of venture capital investment on economic growth and innovation: Evidence from the USA and Russia

Abstract

We hear a lot of political declarations stating the importance of developing an innovation economy by fostering venture capital inflows. But it is obvious that the venture capital market makes an extremely low contribution in terms of total R&D spending or gross investment. Thus, theory says venture capital investment (VCI) is important due to its huge impact on modernization, but practitioners note that there is no evidence and VCI constitutes about 1% of total investments. Formal logic foregrounds the thesis that the effect of venture investment is important and significant, but delayed. We contribute to the theory and discussion of the problem of choosing between venture and non-venture funding by determining a specific niche for venture capital investment. We derive lagged regression models for GDP and patent applications for the US and Russia, to test VCI’s impact on economic growth and innovation. Comparison of model estimates shows significant VCI influence on GDP at a 4-6- year lag and no synchronous influence, valid for both the US and Russia. We prove the main hypothesis of our research: the effect of venture investment on economic and innovation development parameters is significant and much greater than that of ‘conventional’ investment.