Money Spent on Research By Firms

Question

I have a faculty member looking for data on how much Canadian firms spend on research.  She's hoping to get the data by company size and sector.

There seemed to be data of interest from Research and Development in Canadian Industry (RDCI) (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=4201&lang=en&db=imdb&adm=8&dis=2) through CANSIM 358-0024, various publications, and the Summary Table at http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/econ151a-eng.htm.

The publication at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=88-001-X200900410909&lang=eng seems to get close to what she seems to want, but she needs more granularity for the industry sectors.

Is there any chance of getting more current, detailed data through the DLI?  If not, is custom data an option, and could we get some idea of price based on number of industry sectors, company size breakdown, and geography (i.e., number of provinces).

If anyone has an idea of another place to get this data, we'd be interested.  She also seems to want the figures by company (within a sector).  I was able to search OSIRIS by country and industry sector (up to 6-digit NAICS) and get a list of companies.  I was then able to view R&D amounts for each company in the financials -- one company at a time.  Although it was possible to export a dataset for broader financials, it didn't seem possible to include the more detailed financials (i.e., R&D figures) in the export file.

Answer

Company-level R&D expenditures are available in the Financial Post Corporate database, as well as in the Compustat Canadian file.