The Innovation Ability Of China’s Agricultural Science And Technology: Spatial Difference, Influencing Factors And Upgrade Strategies

With the increasing resource constraints of agricultural production, the improvement of modern agricultural productivity depended more on agricultural science and technology innovation. However, intellectual property rights were taken as the core competitiveness to promote international agriculture with the development of knowledge innovation.Therefore, some relevant questions arose in the historic moment. Such as, whether the spatial and temporal patterns of China’s agricultural science and technology innovation changed according to the perspective of intellectual property rights? Were there obvious differences of agricultural science and technology innovation ability with different areas and period? What was the development trend of the changes? What reason had caused this kind of change? Undoubtedly, all the answers to these questions could contribute to revealing the current situation and development mechanism of China’s agricultural science and technology innovation. Therefore, this paper took new varieties of plants as an example to analyze the current situation, temporal evolution characteristics, and spatial distribution patterns as well as regional differences of the capability of agricultural scientific and technological innovation based on classical theories as space technology diffusion theory and economic convergence theory. In addition, with related experience in abroad, the paper put forward suggestions and countermeasures to build political mechanism to improve the capability of agricultural scientific & technological innovation.The results were shown as follows:(1) Both the number of China’s agricultural scientific research institutions and human resources investment were on the decline, while agricultural science and technology spending, the number of subjects, science and technology papers and works published as well as agricultural knowledge achievements were increasing.However, there were obvious imbalance in the spatial and industrial distributions of agricultural science and technology input and output resources.The results showed that: ① the number of China’s agricultural scientific research institutions was on the decline at the average annual decline 0.37% from 1993 to 2014.Among all the institutions, the number of planting institution was more than other industries and there was significant imbalance in the distribution of regional agriculturalscientific research institutions. ② Human resource and fund investments of agricultural scientific research institutions had different change trend. The number of human resources in the eastern coastal and developed areas was much larger than that in northwest and southwest areas. Agricultural science and technology spending were put on government capital investment, and expenditure of scientific and technical activities were mainly used to support science and technology activities of planting institutions. ③There were obvious increasing trend in the number of subjects, science and technology papers and works published as well as agricultural knowledge achievements. Taken subject as an example,the subject types were mainly about experimental development and subjects about basic research were at the least. In addition, provincial agricultural research institutions were the main subject practitioners and the proportion of planting institutions were relatively high.China’s agricultural knowledge innovation showed good development momentum, the findings, the ability to obtain a patent and their quality had been improved.(2) The innovation of China’s new varieties of plants showed good development momentum, and both innovation bodies and crop types were developing diversely.There were differences between provincial and regional areas. In addition, there was Granger causality between the innovation of new varieties of plants and agricultural economy development, and the innovation ability of new varieties of plants had a positive influence on agricultural economy development.The empirical analyses showed that: ① The application and authorization number of new varieties of plants among member states of UPOV had shown an increasing trend from 1999 to 2014, especially, the annual effective number of new plant varieties authorized had a steady increasing trend. However, there were differences among countries in the application, authorization and the cumulatively effective authorization of new plant varieties. ② The innovation of China’s new varieties of plants had shown good development momentum from 1999 to 2014. The application and authorization number of new varieties and innovation bodies had shown an increasing trend, and both varieties and breeding R&D investment bodies had developed diversely. However, the provincial and regional application number of new varieties of plants in China was much more than the authorization number, and there were differences in achievement transformation ability and innovation consciousness of new plant varieties among different regions. ③ There was Granger causality between the capacity of new varieties of plants and agriculturaleconomy development, and the capacity of new varieties of plants in the current period or in the former 1 to 3 periods had a positive influence on agricultural economy development.(3) The capacity of China’s new varieties of plants innovation showed good development momentum, and the pattern of innovation bodies tended to rationalized.Both the low-value areas and the high-value areas of innovation capacity obviously had catch-up effects. However, the abilities of different innovation bodies in different regions were different, and these kinds of differences mainly came from regional disparities.The empirical analyses showed that: ① The capacity of China’s new varieties of plants innovation had shown good development momentum from 2002 to 2014 and the innovation capacities of new plants varieties of different bodies and regions had been improved. The pattern of innovation bodies tends to rationalized. However,the abilities of different innovation bodies and different regions had obvious different. ② Both the low-value areas and the high-value areas of innovation capacity obviously had catch-up effects, but general innovation capacities were still different, presenting three obvious “down-up” phases. The high-value areas of innovation capacity mainly concentrated on eastern coastal areas and central areas like Henan and Hunan provinces as well as western areas as Sichuan, Yunnan provinces in 2014. ③ The innovation abilities of new plants varieties in different regions were different, and these kinds of differences mainly come from regional disparities. In terms of disparities inside the regions, except that general disparities in North China had increased, general disparities of the other five districts had decreased differently and their average annual decline and temporal fluctuations were different. In terms of regional disparities, the disparities between the southwest region and the northern region, between the eastern region and the northeast region had increased slightly, but the disparities among other regions had decreased, and the decreasing degrees and speeds were different.(4) There was an obvious s convergent tendency in innovation ability of new plant variety in China, but evidently differences existed in the regions. There was a significant absolute b convergent characteristic of innovation ability in the spatial and temporal patterns, but the influencing factors of conditional convergence varied in both national and regional.The results showed that: ① The innovation ability of new plant varieties had anobvious s convergent tendency with the three stages characteristic as the fluctuant decreasing stage, the constant decreasing and fluctuant increasing from 2002 to 2014.However, the regional trends were significantly different. ② The innovation ability of new plants varieties showed an absolute b convergence in the spatial and temporal patterns with different the converging rates. Taken three main areas as an example, the western had the fastest convergent speeds up to 4.18%, the central was 3.69% and the eastern was2.27% to be the slowest. ③ The factors affecting the growth rate of the innovation ability of new plants varieties were different. At the same time, the theory of new classical economic growth and technological gap were strongly proved in the model. Such as, the level of economic development was not always the necessary condition to promote the innovation ability of new plants varieties. Previous base of the innovation ability did not guarantee the continuous improvement of the ability in the later period. The ability of absorbing technology was contributed to narrow the gap among innovation capability. The export situation could enhance the innovation ability, while be bad for narrowing the regional differences. The expenditure intensity of research funds and that of agriculture research institution, urbanization and FDI index did not significantly affect the innovation ability. Besides, the influencing factors were different among regions due to regional economic level, ability to absorb technology, FDI and export etc.(5) The innovation ability of agricultural science and technology could be improved by policy mechanism set up by governmental, financial regulatory mechanism, property rights coordination mechanism and market economy regulation.Firstly, we should constructe the guarantee system of agricultural science and technology innovation by law regulation means. The specific practices include that we should improve and update the regulations of protecting new results originating from agricultural science and technology, and raise these regulations to the legal level. In addition, we should give more attention to the publicity of the importance of protecting agricultural scientific achievements to cultivate the consciousness of rights protection of innovation bodies. Secondly, we should use the economic regulators to construct the financial regulation mechanism of agricultural science and technology which mainlyconcerns input intensity and structure of research funds. Finally, it has significant to structure the mechanism of property rights with innovation of administrative management with simplifying the application process, reducing management costs and extending the protection period. As for the market regulation mechanism, we should construct the ordering trading platform of agricultural scientific and technological results to realize their economic value. This mainly includes clarifying the owner-ship, constructing the trading platform and normalizing the contract of agricultural science and technology achievement.There could be three main innovations of this research showed as followings:Firstly, the perspective of the research is unique. As for previous agricultural scientific innovation research, intellectual property right protection and new varieties of plants, the existing literature mainly combined two of them at most, such as the effects of intellectual property right protection on agricultural scientific innovation(Liu et al., 2010;Liu and Xu, 2010), the influence of the protection of new plants varieties on technological innovation(Zhou and Chen, 2004) and the behavior research of main innovation bodies(Huang and Lin, 2007; Wang et al., 2015). But, there were few studies made a combination of the above three research objects. Therefore, this research took new varieties of plants for example to explore the innovation problems of agricultural science and technology from the perspective of intellectual property rights. It was not only took the full consideration of the importance of intellectual property rights protection on agricultural development, but also made an in-depth analysis on developments status of germplasm resources. In addition, we also gave detail analysis on the impact of new plants varieties on agricultural science and technology innovation at the same time.Secondly, the method of the research is diversification. In the previous research of Intellectual property protection and new varieties of plant, those research method mainly focused on qualitative analysis and the quantitative research was quite less, especially, the descriptive statistical analysis was about half to the quantitative research. However, the method of the research included three categories, namely, the literature analysis,comparative analysis and inductive deductive method, econometric methods. In terms of econometric method, firstly, the research using of unit root test, co-integration analysis and causality test to identify the relationship between the innovation of new plant varieties and the development of agricultural economy. In addition, we built the distributed lag model to quantify the influence the innovation ability of mew plant on agricultural economy by the method of Almon polynomial method and ordinary least squares.Secondly, combined with the theory of technology diffusion theory and economic convergence, the research used the decomposition Gini coefficient of Dagum to study the spatial differences of new plant varieties innovation ability. Finally, with the convergence model, we analyzed the innovation trend and factors of new plant varieties. In a word, the research applied a variety of combination methods so that we can get a further research of agricultural science and technology innovation problems under the perspective of intellectual property rights.Thirdly, the research content existed novelty. The previous studies, especially the research of intellectual property rights, paid more attention to the analysis of its status in general, and only part of the study referred to its trends characteristics and influences.However, this paper took new varieties of plants as example to discuss the improving strategy of agricultural science and technology innovation ability under perspective of the intellectual property rights. To be specific, the research summarized the distribution features of the agricultural science and technology resources in China based on analyzing the process of agricultural science and technology innovation. And based on the perspective of both at home and abroad, the research analyzed the present situation of the innovation of new plant varieties and identified the relationship between the innovation of new plant varieties and agricultural economic development in order to quantify its impact on the development of agricultural economy. And then, the research further analyzed the spatial differences of new plant varieties innovation ability in different areas based on the temporal evolution characteristics of new plant varieties about different main innovation bodies. Next, the research further analyzed the convergence of new plant varieties innovation ability, measured its rate and analyzed its influencing factors. Finally, on the basis of using the experience of foreign agricultural science and technology innovation and combined with research conclusion, the research built the policy guarantee mechanism to promote China’s agricultural science and technology innovation ability.Therefore, from the research content of the overall layout, this research was to deepen and expand the existing literature.