State Policy in the Field of Economics: Foundations, Opportunities, Guidelines

Taking into account discussions on relations regarding scientific economic knowledge in terms of public goods, we consider the general foundations of state policy in the field of economic science management and support for its development. One of the ways to explain the reasons for government intervention is the alleged underproduction of scientific economic knowledge due to the free-rider problem as one of the manifestations of market failure. At the same time, based on the concept of dispersed and implicit knowledge, it is shown that economics is characterized by properties that limit the possibilities of effective direct impact on the development of research programs by measures of vertical industrial policy. The proposed direction is complementary to traditional methods of government support (subsidies, grants, government procurement) – investments in the development of an information infrastructure for the exchange of scientific ideas, which would create a separating equilibrium and answer the question of who is who in economics. The complementarity of state scientific policy instruments is explained in the light of the principle of sufficient diversity. It is shown that such a scenario is possible and even more likely in the case of competition between digital platforms – scientific databases.