Empirical Research On The Regional Innovation Efficiency In China

In the beginning of this century,"improve self innovation capability, and build a nation of innovation"has been proposed by the Chinese government as a core of new national development strategy. The government attempts to maintain sustainable economic development by upgrading the industrial structure and transforming the economical growth pattern through technology innovation. It should be pointed out that the increase in R&D is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition for building a nation of innovation. The emphasis should be placed not only on the quantity of the investment in R&D, but also on the efficiency of the investment. This is especially true for a country with lower per capita resources in science and technology as compared to the developed nations.The main goal of the current study was to evaluate the performance of China regional innovation system. Based on the panel data of China's 30 regions during 1998-2007, using the stochastic frontier analysis(SFA) method and data envelopment analysis(DEA) method, We analyzed the regional innovation static efficiency, dynamic efficiency, the convergence of efficiency and examined the influences of various factors on innovation efficiency. Our main conclusions are:(1) The whole country's R&D innovation efficiency is low, and still has a large space for improving; The efficiency calculated by the SFA method is higher than the DEA method, and the former is stabler; although the average efficiency value calculated by the SFA and DEA method is remarkable difference, but the order has a high uniformity. When we appraise the innovation development condition of various provinces, the two methods has the same effect.(2) Technology progress is the main cause of the growth of total factor productivity of regional innovation, but the efficiency improvement is not obvious; the growth of total factor productivity, the technology progress and the efficiency improvement of regional innovation reckoned by defferent method are notably defferent, not ever the value, but also the order. The results calculated by SFA method conforms to reality better.(3) There is notable absolute convergence in the whole country and the central and western regions, but the eastern region is not notable; There is conditional convergence in the whole country and all regions, and the improvement of pure technical efficiency is the common factor that influencing the conditional convergence; human capital is the main cause that facilitate the conditional convergence of the whole country and the central and western regions, but the industry structure to the eastern region.(4) The construct of the regional innovation system in China is not desirable. In a short-term, the financial support from local government and financial companies, and the interplay between enterprises and universities (research institutes) had significantly negative impact on innovation efficiency. In a long-term, both of the financial support from local government and the interplay between enterprises and universities have not a notable influence on regional innovation efficiency. An important task for the policy makers is to further improve the supportive system and the relationship between the major actors.