A Study On The Contribution Of R&D Input To The Performance Of Petrochemical Enterprises

Technical innovation is the core of the competitive edge as well as the basic source of achieving the advancement of science and technology and accelerating the economic growth, while R&D is the most important and primary connotation of the technical innovation. The enterprises constituted the major force carrying out the R&D activities in a country. As the international competition became increasingly severe, how to choose projects and manage the activities in R&D and, more importantly, how to properly evaluate the R&D effectiveness would directly influence the economic growth and the competitive edge of an enterprise. The research on how R&D contributed to the enterprise performance constituted a hot issue that attracts attentions.In this thesis, parameter and non-parameter frontier methods were employed to comprehensively evaluate the R&D contribution in addition to traditional technical innovation method and linear programming method. Data was collected from 3575 observations from 1989 to 2002 which covered 400 listed companies in 25 countries in the global petrochemical industry. The R&D output flexibility and the enterprise productive efficiency on the stochastic frontier production function were computed. Based on the above two parameters three economic cycles of thedevelopment of the global petrochemical industry were identified. Also obtained were parameters via data envelopment analysis, which was employed to describe the effect of R&D allocation.It was concluded from above evaluations that the R&D input and the market value of the enterprise were positively correlated and consequently directly and positively influenced the change of the technical efficiency of the enterprises. The changes in technology triggered the shift of economic cycle from one to the next and thus inhibited the decreasing trend of the scale benefit in the global petrochemical industry and brought it in continuous developing.The research method in this thesis provided an operable approach to the comparison among the international R&D activities. Based on the analysis of the input and output data, some examples were extracted for the domestic enterprises, which might be helpful in making decisions in R&D and improving the competitive edge for petrochemical enterprises in China.