ECONOMIC-LEGAL INCENTIVES AS A TOOL OF STATE POLICY FOR THE PRODUCTION AND USE OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS: DOCTRINE, INSTRUMENTS, AND EFFECTIVENESS CRITERIA

Abstract

Autonomous systems are moving from labs to production lines and public services, exposing mismatches between traditional innovation incentives and heightened demands for safety, transparency, and accountability. This paper reframes economic-legal incentives not as a scatter of perks but as an integrated architecture of mutual obligations among the state, developers, and procurers. The objective is to design a risk-oriented framework for selecting and combining instruments–tax, financial, regulatory, procurement, and infrastructural–across classes of autonomy and contexts of use while preserving procedural legitimacy. The study blends doctrinal legal analysis with comparative law, policy design, and regulatory impact reasoning. Empirical inputs include recent scholarly debates, data on innovation-oriented public procurement, case studies of regulatory sandboxes and fiscal incentives in peer jurisdictions, and sectoral examples from transport, healthcare, and industrial automation. Results are operationalized via three indicator groups: innovation outputs, procedural-legal quality, and safety outcomes. The paper proposes a taxonomy of instruments with criteria for legal fitness and conditions of use, and advances a model of “contingent incentives” linked to conformity assessment, algorithmic audit, data traceability, and rapid recall mechanisms. It develops an algorithm for composing instrument bundles from risk profile and autonomy level to a trio of sandboxing, mission-oriented procurement with control gates, and fiscal levers tied to verifiable milestones. The analysis shows that innovation procurement acts as a demand multiplier, whereas tax incentives are effective only when they “read” the technology lifecycle and the availability of testing infrastructure. A set of indicators sensitive to both innovation output and procedural quality is articulated. Effective stimulation of autonomous systems is not the sum of benefits but an architecture of “stitches” between support, responsibility, and oversight. The most successful bundles accelerate innovation while ensuring adjacent risks and preserving the capacity to stop or recalibrate without collapsing entire programs. The proposed framework is directly implementable in procurement documentation and R&D support schemes, strengthening verifiability, procedural legitimacy, and public trust.