The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the level and distribution of intangibles investment in the UK

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates trends in intangibles investment since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. Responses from an online survey show that investment in R&D has dropped substantially for many firms but that over 40% of firms increased their ICT investment, which is likely to reflect the need to facilitate remote working and customer engagement. Industry is a major predictor of the change in intangibles investment. This is consistent with expectations in light of the different effect that measures to contain the pandemic have had across industries.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• intangibles investment
• R&D
• ICT

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D22
• L20
• O32

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ For R&D, the question was: ‘How has your organisation’s spending on R&D (research & development) in the UK changed compared to the year up to March 2020?’

² For example, hotels and restaurants in England were closed from the 23^rd March to the 4^th July and belonging to the accommodation and food services sector is associated with a decline of 38 percentage points in R&D investment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through the Productivity Insights Network [Reference ES/R007810/1].