Funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union

About SPINTAN

Smart Public Intangibles

What is SPINTAN?

The SPINTAN project aims at discovering the theoretical and empirical underpins of public intangible policies. It widens previous work carried out by Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2009) including the public sector in their analytical framework in different complementary directions

The project has the following three objectives:

  1. to build a public intangible database for a wide set of EU countries, complemented with some big non-EU countries
  2. to analyze the impact of public sector intangibles on innovation, well-being and “smart” growth (including education, R&D and innovation, and the construction of a digital society)
  3. to pay special attention to the medium/long term consequences of austerity policies in view of the expected recovery.

How is it structured?

The project is organized around six work packages.

  • WP 1 concentrates on the methodological discussion on the concept of intangibles in the public sector and the definition of its boundaries.
  • WP 2 will be devoted to the construction of a database for a large set of EU countries and the US, plus three developing countries (China, India, and possibly Brazil), complementary to the one already developed by the INTAN-Invest project.
  • WP 3 will make a detailed analysis of the implications for smart growth and social inclusion of three key aspects of public sector policies: health, education and R&D with special reference to higher education institutions.
  • WP 4 will investigate the effect of spillovers of public sector intangibles on the business sector, within a country or across countries.
  • WP 5 will address the study of the present and future consequences of the austerity measures taken since 2008.
  • WP 6 will bring together the different pieces offering a synthesis of the main results emphasizing the main policy implications.

Who is involved?

The project is carried out by academic researchers in a range of European institutes and universities. The project coordinator is Matilde Mas, Ivie (Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas), Spain.

Presentation of SPINTAN project