The Research Of University R&D Spatial Knowledge Spillover Effect On Regional Technical Development

With the advent of knowledge economic, national competition depends increasingly ontechnical progress. In the context of China, most of enterprises have poor sense ofself-innovation, low research investment and limited absorptive capabilities to the introducedtechnology. Apart from some big companies, the majority of Chinese enterprises are still notthe key subjects of regional innovation. On the other hand, as the origin of knowledgeproduction, university plays an increasingly important role in regional innovation system andits R&D knowledge spillover effect on technical progress is a key to the construction anddevelopment of regional innovation system. Therefore, based on the subject of universities in31areas, the paper empirically researched the effects of university R&D on local technologyprogress and its influencing factors with consideration of geo-spatial effect of knowledgespillover. We tried to build the empirical framework of university R&D, spatial knowledgespillover and regional technical development, which could help policy makers promotingregional knowledge spillover, thus the technical and economic progress in local area.The paper used spatial econometric model with data from province level from2000to2009, of which variables i.e. general research expense, application research expense,experimental research expense and local total factor productivity (TNF) were included. Afterthat the influencing factors of local absorptive capabilities, geo-distance were introduced intothe model to verify their effects on the degree of knowledge spillover. The main conclusionincludes: a). the distribution of university R&D activities is unbalanced among regions inChina. Most R&D investment is highly concentrated in a few provinces and it has spatialcorrelation with regional technical progress. b). local universities’ R&D activities have activeknowledge spillover effects on local technical progress. However, compared with companyR&D investment, local university R&D investment has lower spillover effect. c. universityR&D activities have much more significant spatial spillover effect than local effect. d.absorption ability adjusts the spillover effect between university R&D activities and localtechnical progress. e. the spatial spillover effect decays with geographic distance.