The Spatial Differentiation Of Global R&D Activities And The Rise Of R&D Emerging Economies

In the era of knowledge-based economy, Science and Technology play more and more important roles in the development of economy and society, and the technical level of a country has become one of the major criteria to evaluate the competiveness of a country. Being the core activities of Science and Technology, Research & Development has been caught great attention of governments and the business. Under the background of S&T globalization, the innovative competence of a country not only comes from its own R&D input and output, but also depends upon the global R&D resources, which will give impetus to the innovative activities from an external aspect. As a result, with the development of R&D globalization, there have been many changes in the spatial differentiation of global R&D activities recently.Taking the spatial differentiation of R&D activities as a guideline, the author studied the spatial distribution of global R&D activities in different countries from the perspective of global macro-scope. And then based on the spatial evolution and development trend of R&D activities, it has been found that R&D Emerging Economies has risen gradually. Finally, with the rise of R&D Emerging Economies, its inner parts of R&D activities are imbalanced as to the spatial distribution. The following issues had been studied in detail:i) Based on the literature review and theoretical analysis, the author studied the major doers and the evolutionary history of R&D activities, and analyzed the roles that different doers played in terms of R&D activities. ii) Through a series of indexes that related to R&D activities,the empirical study had been made to analyze the spatial differentiation of R&D activities in 38 countries, and then the spatial agglomeration has been measured by some different variables. iii) Based on the panel data of R&D input, output and its factors, the R&D efficiency of 31 countries has been calculated. iv) According to the latest changes and developing trends of the spatial differerentiation of global R&D activities, the dissertation finds out that R&D Emerging Economies are rising, and has shed light on the cause of their emergence, especially highlighted the rise of India and China's R&D activities. v) Then from the micro scope perspective, taking the provinces and major cities of China as research target, the spatial differerentiation of R&D activities in China has been studied. Meanwhile the Factor Analysis method has been employed to analyze the mechanism of spatial differerentiation of R&D activities in China.Based on the theoretical and empirical analysis mentioned above, it comes to the conclusion as follows:i) Based on the major doers of R&D activities and its evolution, we can draw the conclusion that:firstly, enterprises, universities and research institutions are the main doers of R&D activities; Secondly, as far as the evolution of R&D activities is concerned, it developed from scratch, from the internalization to the externalization, from the primitive to the advanced stage; Thirdly, under the background of S&T globalization, R&D globalization becomes more and more evident,while R is inclined to be concentrated, and D tends to be scattered.ii) From the perspective of global, R&D activities are concentrated mainly among the Big Triangle of U.S.A, Japan and Europe. However, with the rise of R&D Emerging Economies such as India, China, South Korea and Brazil, the differentiation of global R&D activities changes from the Big Triangle to the multipolars. And the various indicators of R&D activities have different spatial characteristics. In terms of R&D intensity and human labour investment, they are concentrated on the U.S.A, Japan and Europe, and the liveness of R&D activities is not yet showed in India, China and Brazil. But when it comes to the triadic patent and science and engineering papers, the trend of decentralization is much clearer, and India and China become more and more powerful. As far as R&D fund input is concerned, India and China play the leading role in the world, and attract a large sum of foreign R&D investment. Moreover, considering the spatial agglomeration of R&D activities in major countries, R&D outputs are much higher than R&D inputs in general. And the spatial agglomeration of the triadic patent is the highest, and the amount of science and engineering papers is the next, but R&D intensity and Full Time Equivalent of R&D workers are not so high relatively. In long run, the spatial agglomerations of all variables display the decreasing trend.iii) According to the analysis of allocation efficiency of R&D resources in 31 countries, it reveals that:U.S.A, Japan, Germany and Britain are the big powers of R&D input and output, yet their R&D efficiency is not so high; Switzland, Sweden, South Korea, Canada and Australian have the highest R&D efficiency, and the R&D efficiency of China, India, Brazil and South Africa are relatively high. With the global R&D activities transferring to the region of lower cost and high efficiency, R&D Emerging Economies are on the horizon. According to the output elasticity of R&D resources, human labour is much stronger than that of funds generally. Furthermore, the output elasticity of human labour in high-income countries is stronger than that of middle-income countries, but the output elasticity of funds in high-income countries is weaker than that of middle-income countries. In addition, the ectogenous variables including imports and exports of high-tech products and FDI have positive effects on the allocation efficiency of R&D resources.iv) The spatial distribution of R&D activities in China is characterized by decreasing step by step from the east to the west, and it concentrated on such regions as Bohai Bay Region that Beijing centered, Yangtze River Delta that Shanghai centered, and Pearl River Delta that Shenzhen centered. From the perspective of spatial agglomeration of R&D activities in China, the turnover of technology market contract is the highest, and the patent application, R&D funds inputs, scientific papers published and Full Time Equivalent of R&D workers. In short, from the developing process of R&D activities in China, the spatial agglomeration of different variables is displaying the increasing tendency.v) Based on the factors that affected the spatial differentiation in China, we found that most of factors have the positive effects on R&D output, such as GDP, the quantity of the personnel engaged in scientific and technological activities, the numbers of universities, college students that enrolled, education funding input, the number of foreign enterprise, the scale of FDI, expenditures for science and technology activities, long-distance telephone exchange capacity, mobile phone exchange capacity, internet access interface and so on. However, the average wage of workers and air quality has no obvious effects on R&D output. We can draw a conclusion that the development of economy, education, science and technology, the scale of foreign direct investment, the infrastructure of communications have the favorable influence on R&D output.