A crescente interdisciplinaridade da contabilidade coloca os seus profissionais perante inúmeros e constantes desafios, sendo exigido aos mesmos uma elevada preparação em vários domínios. Este manual pretende contribuir de uma forma essencialmente prática para o debate e reflexão sobre vários dilemas éticos perante os quais os profissionais de contabilidade são confrontados no seu dia a dia.

In the standard Schumpeterian-growth models only follower firms invest in R&D activities and larger economies grow faster. Since these results are counterfactual, this paper reveals that leader firms often support R&D activities and economic growth can be independent of the market size. In particular, the maintenance of R&D leadership increases with: (i) the technological-knowledge gap between leader and followers, since a firm-specific learning effect of accumulated technological knowledge from past R&D is considered, (ii) the leaders' strategies that delay the next successful R&D supported by some follower firm, (iii) the market size, and (iv) the up-grade of each innovation.

We propose a general equilibrium knowledge-driven (semi-)endogenous-growth model with horizontal R&D, which is extended to consider two types of labour, skilled and unskilled, and exogenous government expenditure, financed through taxes on financial assets and on labour income, to analyse the implications of the tax system on R&D intensity, economic growth, wage inequality and consumption share in the output. In particular, we show that: (i) taxes have negative influence in the consumption share, being higher the marginal effect of the labour-income tax; (ii) for any given government expenditure share, an increase (a decrease) in financial-assets tax decreases (increases) the labour-income tax; (iii) only the financial-assets tax affects negatively the R&D intensity and the skill-premium; thus, to reduce the skill-premium the financial-assets tax must increase; (iv) ignoring the effect on wage inequality and on R&D intensity, taxes are substitutes.