Spatial Spillover, Absorptive Capacity And Emerging Industries Development In China

The experiences of economic development around the world show that the relationship among scientific and technical revolution, industry evolution and economic cycle is highly consistent. Each scientific and technical revolution would produce a batch of emerging industries. The rapid development of emerging industries would bring the rapid growth of world economy. And when the world economy was in a low, it would lead to a new revolution of science and technology, foster new industries, and then make the world economy into a new round of growth cycle. At present, it is the golden era of emerging industries development, dominated by the third revolution of science and technology. Whether grasp the historical to rapidly develop emerging industries, not only directly affects the level of regional economic development in recent years, but also is related to its future development space and competitive strength. Developing emerging industries needs to have new technologies. For developing economies, independent research and development, international trade and international cooperation are generally the main channels to access new technologies. A number of internal and external literatures indicate that absorbing spillover from developed economies is a very effective way of technological advances for developing economies backward technical gap. Based on spatial deaden, foreign spillover cannot automatically combine with local production factors and convert into productivity. Even in the same space and time, developing economies can actually get what extent of foreign spillover is finally depended on their absorptive capacity. Therefore, utilizing spillover to obtain technologies and develop emerging industries, in addition to accessibility, regional absorptive capacity is the most critical factor. This is the logic foundation and motivation of this research. Spatial dependence (spatial autocorrelation) is the external performance of spatial externality, but spatial spillover is the intrinsic motivation of realizing externality. Based on the theories of spatial interaction, endogenous growth and regional development, this paper adopts normative analysis to analyze related theories of spatial spillover, absorptive capability, technological innovation and industrial evolution, uses SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) to empirically study spatial spillover, absorptive capacity and regional emerging industries development and their relationships, and obtains the following conclusions. First, it clears off the basic connotation of "spillover" by tracing to the source--spillover for the "more"("more" can be absolute and relative), analyzes the multiple dimensions of "spatial spillover" by the "mWnH" method and emphasizes that the essence of spatial spillover should be the flow and drift of space--a space with various elements flows to another space and interacts with each other to realize the effect of"1+1>2". Second, on the basis of high-tech industries’ objective data of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Hubei, this study uses the basic relationship model among spatial spillover, absorptive ability, emerging industries development and environmental factor, and conducts exploring and confirmatory factor analysis from the two dimensions of regional and industry with the help of structural equation modeling. Empirical results show that:(1) the emerging industry development is positively related to absorptive capacity, in two dimensions to verify the hypothesis, and there is a strong correlation between them;(2) the hypothesis that spatial spillover positively affects the development of emerging industries, has not been tested in the regional dimension of Shanghai and the industry level of aerospace manufacturing industry;(3) the positive correlation between absorptive capacity and spatial spillover is validated at the regional level of a single area, but the full sample does not pass validation;(4) absorptive capacity has an obvious moderating effect on spatial spillover promoting emerging industries development, which has been demonstrated in two dimensions of regional and industry;(5) environmental factors have a positive effect on the absorption ability, which has not been validated in Guangdong and Hubei area;(6) on the model itself, the results of Beijing and Shanghai are better than those of Guangdong and Hubei in the regional dimension, and the results of electronic and communication equipment manufacturing industry, the electronic computer and office equipment manufacturing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing industry are better than those of aerospace manufacturing industry and medical and instrument manufacture in the industrial dimension;(7) observation variables used to measure the latent variables have differences in different regions and industries, even larger.This study shows that spatial spillover as a kind of objective existence will not automatically affect the development of regional emerging industries. It requires certain conditions, following reasonable mechanisms along the specific paths. For developing economies, to acquire advanced technology to promote emerging industries development through spatial spillover, not only do they need to enhance their absorptive capacity, but also focus on the roles of institution and culture, combined with the specific industries to select suitable paths according to the different nature of technology.