Tax incentives for private companies to fund academic research

Question

I wonder what tax incentives private companies have to fund academic research. As it is sometimes difficult to assess financial impacts of tax laws, I would even more interested to have some numbers reflecting the importance of these tax incentives, e.g. "For 100kUSD for funds coming from a private company, the later saves 20kUSD of taxes on average" (which would mean one could consider such funding to be actually ~20% funded by taxpayers).

I am mostly interested in the United States but curious about other countries as well.

Answer 1

The US has substantial research tax credits; in 2005, tax credit claims came to $6.6 billion USD, though it's not immediately stated what overall private R&D expenditure was in that period. (I suspect it would not be too difficult to find out...). Similar programs exist in many countries; see this 2014 survey.

The Deloitte report helpfully summarises (pp. 54-55) whether subcontracted research is eligible under the various national laws (which would cover academic funding); for the US, they are but you get a reduced deduction, while for Austria (for example) there is a 1m Euro cap on the amount that can be claimed for subcontracted research, and in the Czech Republic it has to be in-house to qualify.