Knowledge Transfer between Academic Research and Industrial Policy: A Proximity Analysis of Italian Economic Research and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan

This paper investigates the relationship between economic research and industrial policy, while emphasizing the importance of a robust research base for effective policy design. It focuses on Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (nrrp), a comprehensive industrial policy document adopted in 2021 as part of the NextGenerationeu initiative. Using 20,420 scientific papers (2001-2024) from economic scholars affiliated with Italian universities, advanced text analysis techniques, including cosine similarity and sentence embedding models, were employed to evaluate alignment between academic research and the nrrp, as well as the individual missions of the nrrp. The analysis addresses three objectives: measuring proximity between research and policy; identifying gaps in alignment for specific policy priorities; and exploring the temporal evolution of proximity between research and policy documents. The results reveal limited alignment between research and policy, with significant gaps for certain priorities. The trend of the proximity does not seem to be contingent on the adoption of an industrial policy document. These findings underscore the need for targeted research policies to bridge knowledge gaps and enhance the integration of research into policymaking, ultimately supporting evidence-based decision-making and national priorities.