| Global standards of patent protection have been strengthened in recent years, so do our country. There's a controversy over the effects of strengthened patent protection on innovative activity, since these effects can be different during different countries, different industries and times. This thesis calculates our country's patent protection index using the most advanced method, and then is particularly concerned with the effects of patent protection on different levels of innovative (autonomous, improved or imitative) inputs, outputs and innovative efficiency of China's high technology industries by analyzing the panel data of 17 high technology industries during 1995 to 2007, and finally analyzes the causes of these effects, and believes that enhancing patent protection can increase autonomous innovation while decreasing improved or imitative innovation.This thesis includes five parts:part one is introduction. It first introduces the background and meaning of research, and points out the main objectives of research by summarizing debates over patent system. Then, this part explains the basic methodology and main ideas of this thesis and two important concepts:patent protection and technogical innovation, and how to measure them. Part two is the related literature summary, a summary of theoretical and empirical studies of foreign and domestic documents. Part three studies the trends of the strength of our country's patent protection, and the changes of innovative activity in high technology industries during 1995 to 2007. After a very brief historical survey of our country's patent law, this part calculates the patent protection index in these 13 years using several indicators, which have been developed and improved by Ginarte, Park and other scholars. Then part three makes three hypotheses:1, patent strength has significant positive effect on high technology industries'R&D; 2, patent strength negatively affects the patents owned by high technology industries and new product sales; 3, patent strength has no significant effect on high technology industries' innovation efficiency. The forth part builds three models to analyze the relationship between patent strength and innovative inputs, outputs and innovative efficiency by improving the classical models of foreign literature, in order to test the three hypotheses in part two and to find out the deeper relationship between patent strength and innovative activity. The last part is conclusion. The empirical work doesn't support hypothesis 1. Patent strength is negatively related with high technology industries'R&D while positively related with basic research and application research, and the strengthening of patent protection reduced the R&D input due to the low proportion of basic research and application research in R&D. There's also not enough evidence to support hypothesis 2. The effect of patent strength on patent output depends on the growth rate of patent strength, and the relationship between the growth rate of patent strength and patent output is like a'U', and our country lies in the left side of the'U'in the most year of 1995 to 2007. The relationship between patent protection and new product sales is like an inverse U. Enhancing patent protection can increase autonomous innovative patent output, but reduce improved or imitative patent output, and reduced the patent output of high technology industry because of the low part of autonomous innovation. Hypothesis 3 is supported, and patent protection has no significant effect on high technology industries'innovation efficiency. This find explains there's no direct relationship between the two, but patent protection can indirectly affect innovation efficiency by changing the degree of industry competition and industry structure. At last this thesis holds that our country needs higher level of patent strength to raise the proportion of high level innovation in overall innovative activity, so as to improve our country's whole independent innovative ability. |
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