Resumo

Public intervention to support the knowledge generation is recognized as a fundamental strategy that enables the closing the gap between of latecomers and forerunners economies. Evaluations and academic studies have been conducted on a wide variety of interventions and rapidly expanded what we know about these policies instruments.

This article offers a systematic review and a critical discussion of what the literature has to say about the effectiveness of policy instruments knowledge generation. It is argued that learning about the effectiveness of interventions requires a capacity to seize and interpret its effects.

The article draws on and thematically reviews theoretical and empirical contributions on policies instruments for knowledge production sourced mostly from leading journals. After a comprehensive search exercise, sources were selected based on the judgement of relevance and quality.

Evaluations require more granular evidence which poses challenges for methods of analysis. Specifically, it emphasizes two critical factors to understand the potential of policies for knowledge generation in the catch-up process, which are their sequence of execution and the context dependence of interventions. Since none of these issues has been investigated in depth, some aspects are discussed to guide future evaluations.

This article argues that an adequate understanding of catch-up policies also requires a rigorously detail specific political cases, institutional schemes, and specific projects. In general, our understanding of these interventions is enhanced if emerging approaches have been enriched by specific policy case studies, institutional details, and policy contexts. Put differently, the combination of approaches, with appropriate caveats, represent a significant potential to improve the future production of evidence of policies for the catch-up and learning about policy design.

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