Economic theory and empirical evidence indicate that technological innovation is an important determinant of long-term economic development. Various country policies have been launched in favour of private research and development (R&D) with economic development as the main objective. As often in economics, public intervention is grounded on the presumed existence of market failures. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it provides an overview of the history of R&D-related tax policies in more than ten industrial countries. Second, after reviewing the existent empirical evidence on the effectiveness of R&D tax credits policies, it presents a meta-regression analysis based on an econometric model. Our results show that an R&D tax credit is strongly significant in the studies taken cumulatively.