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Public sector entrepreneurship, politics, and innovation

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Abstract

We suggest that a political leader or a political administration can be described in terms of a public sector entrepreneurship framework. To illustrate, we define the actions of US President Donald Trump’s Administration to refocus the emphasis of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an innovative public policy initiative. And, we explore empirically the social consequences of those actions in terms of changes in the number of STEM employees at the EPA and the number of attendant innovative scientific publications. We find that declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Trump’s Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications.

Plain English Summary

Declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Donald Trump’s Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications. A public sector entrepreneur is an individual who champions an innovative public policy. In this paper we propose that President Trump’s Administration’s policies toward the EPA during his administration were innovative, although different from that of previous administrations. These policies sought to reorient the EPA toward industrial and industry-friendly interests which was contrary to the agency’s health and environmental missions. One response to the administration’s new policies was that experienced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) employees left the EPA. A social consequence of the departure of experienced STEM employees is that the number of environmentally related scientific publications—one indicator of an agency’s innovative activity—from EPA scientists declined. An implication from our empirical findings is that not all public sector entrepreneurial actions are socially desirable; some have potentially detrimental short-run and possible long-run effects on society as a whole.

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Notes

  1. See the literature review on public sector entrepreneurship in Hayter, Link, and Scott (2018). See also Leyden (2016) and the essays on public sector entrepreneurship in Audretsch and Link (2016).

  2. An earlier version of this framework was proposed by Link (forthcoming) with reference to the policy actions of Vannevar Bush.

  3. The reorientation of “the EPA toward industrial and industry-friendly interests” is the innovative public sector initiative referred to in Fig. 1.

  4. See Laffont and Tirole (1991) on regulatory capture.

  5. See Zouboulakis (1997) on alterative review of rationality from both a classical and neoclassical perspective.

  6. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/science-ranks-grow-thin-in-trump-administration/2020/01/23/5d22b522-3172-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html.

  7. Others in the popular presses signal out declines in the EPA’s budgets as a cause for the exodus of scientists from the agency, although an inspection of inflation-adjusted federal R&D allocations to the EPA has been declining year-after-year since the early 2000s. See https://www.aaas.org/programs/r-d-budget-and-policy/historical-trends-federal-rd.

  8. See https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/ and see employment information beginning in FY1998 at the end of each September quarter. The government’s fiscal year is October 1 through September 30. Data are available through FY2020.

  9. The federal government’s definition of STEM employment includes social science and health occupations. We use the complete definition in our analyses below, but we verify the robustness of the results by categorizing these two occupation groups as non-STEM. These results are available on request.

  10. A Probit model yielded similar marginal effects. These results are available from the authors on request.

  11. These results are available from the authors on request.

  12. As stated in NIST (2019, p. 14): “Although intellectual property has traditionally been tracked in terms of the number of patents, licenses, and collaborative efforts [CRADAs], most federal research results are transferred [into society] through publication of S&E [Science and Engineering] articles.”

  13. See www.scopus.com.

  14. R&D data came from AAAS (2021), and the data are measured in millions of $2020. Details of the statistical analysis underlying Figs. 2 and 3 are available from the authors on request.

  15. “… actions have an innovative dimension” refers to the Leyden and Link definition of public sector entrepreneurship as quoted above. See also Link (forthcoming) as an example of micro-oriented research.

References

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  1. Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Dora Gicheva & Albert N. Link

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  1. Dora Gicheva
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  2. Albert N. Link
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Correspondence to Albert N. Link.

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Gicheva, D., Link, A.N. Public sector entrepreneurship, politics, and innovation. Small Bus Econ 59, 565–572 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-021-00550-0

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