The Impact Of Policy Factors On Regional Innovations

Policy factors have important effects on the development of China’s economic and society, and there are many studies from several aspects have carried on the thorough analysis and discussion on this research field. However, based on the existing literatures, we find that there’s little works to discuss the effects of policy factors on the regional innovation ability. Since our country puts forward implement the innovation driven development strategy and puts forward the concept of innovative development, the central government and local governments have formulated and issued a series of regional innovation policies. That inevitably to affect our country’s regional innovation ability and innovation level more or less. However, the current studies on this issue are still relatively less, and haven’t got relatively consistent results. So, there are strong theoretical significance and practical significance to research the problems of the policy factors influence on the regional innovation. From the perspective of policy factors, this article studies the problems of regional innovation ability of our country deeply and meticulously.Combined with the system research on reality background of the economic new normal and the situation of regional innovation in our country, meanwhile considered the data availability, we will from several aspects of policy factors to research the influence of policy factors on the regional innovation ability. These aspects are:the local leaders’ replacement, the government subsidies strength of science and technology, and the national region development strategy. Local leaders’replacement reflects the influence of policy incentives or policy uncertainty on the regional innovation ability. Government subsidies strength of science and technology embodies the government subsidy policy impact on regional innovation ability. National region development strategy reflects the influence of policies of regional planning on the regional innovation ability. According to the ideas of research, this paper’s main research contents include the following aspects.First, from the new normal characteristics of the current economy development, to explore the necessity and importance of implement innovation driven development strategy, on this basis, we make a comprehensive analysis on the present situation and existing problems of China’s regional innovation. Overall, combine with the idea of innovation development, the government departments at all levels have formulated and implemented a series of regional innovation policies, which promoted the innovation outputs such as patents, and greatly enhanced the level of regional innovation. The mainly existing problems include the imbalance of innovation resources distribution, lack of effective cooperation mechanism of regional innovation, and some innovation policies aren’t be implemented very well, etc. Therefore, the central government, the provincial governments and the basic-level governments shall specify their respective responsibilities and tasks, and promote the ability of regional innovation under the new normal.Second, in the local leaders’ replacement angle, this article discusses the impact on the regional innovation ability that bring about by the policy incentives (or policy uncertainty) of local leaders’ replacement. Using the 1998-2013 provincial panel data and fixed effects model, we find that:the replacement of provincial party committee secretary has no significant impact on the regional innovation ability. In contrast, the replacement of governor has a significant positive influence on the regional innovation ability. If we divide the replacement form into "substantial replacement" and "reappointment", we find that the influence of different replacement form of provincial party committee secretary has no obvious change. While, the positive influence of governor’s replacement for regional innovation ability is mainly caused by the substantial replacement.Third, in the government subsidies strength of science and technology angle, we study the technology subsidies policies’ impact on regional innovation capacity. Also using the 1998-2013 provincial panel data and fixed effects model, we find that, on the whole there’s an obvious inverted U-shaped relationship between government subsidies strength of science and technology and regional innovation ability. This means that if the government support strength more than a certain critical point, then it likely to fall into "subsidies trap". At the national level, the inverted U-shaped curve’s turning point of the government subsidies strength of science and technology within a range of about 5%. In addition, the inverted U-shaped relationship is different for the east region and the mid-west region:in east region it’s more significant but in mid-west region it’s no longer significant.Last, in the national region development strategy angle, based on the Yellow River delta efficient ecological economic zone (the Yellow River delta strategy) as an example, this paper makes an empirical research on the innovation effect of regional development strategy that dominated by the government. Using 2005-2013 panel data at the county level and Tobit regression model, we find that the implementation of national region development strategy has positive influence on the region’s innovation, but this positive influence isn’t significant. Through a variety of robustness testing, the above research conclusion is relatively stable. This means that in the subsequent process of formulation and implementation regional development strategy, the government departments at all levels should be more focused on promoting regional innovation.