Two-Dimensional Proximity And Absorptive Capacity Mediatedknowledge Spillovers Between Chinese Provinces

Regional innovation and knowledge spillovers research is a hot issue in the field of economic geography, many researchers examined the mechanisms and processes of regional knowledge spillovers, in these studies, an important issue is the role of proximity in regional knowledge spillovers, currently, scholars’study on proximity mostly concentrated in geographical proximity, Study on the role of proximity in knowledge spillovers from other dimensions are very few. in addition, few scholars conduct research on how to evaluate and measure the role of absorptive capacity in knowledge spillovers.By taking the panel data of31provincial Mainland China in the period of1999-2011as a sample, this paper establish knowledge production function model and take Industrial diversification index as control variable. Based on geographic and technological distance, we construct spatial weights matrix, then amend it by absorptive capacity, Through spatial panel econometric model, this paper analyze the factors that affect inter-provincial knowledge spillovers.Through spatial correlation test, this paper chooses the fixed effects model under the SAR estimates. Empirical results show that R&D personnel and R&D capital significantly promotes the province’s innovative output, and R&D personnel’s coefficient is relatively higher, which indicates that in the terms of innovation output, labor contribution rate is relatively higher than capital contribution rate. Industrial diversification spillovers as a control variable reduces the focal innovative output, however, it is not significant, which suggests that whether Industrial diversification spillovers weakening the local innovative output or not remains to be explored. Based on geographical and techno togical proximity, knowledge spillovers significantly affects local innovative output and the affected strength is0.601and0.643, we can find that technological proximity plays a relatively more important role in knowledge spillovers. Based on the differences of absorptive capacity among regions, this paper construct weight matrix with adjusted by absorptive capacity to study the interaction effects between the absorptive capacity and geographic or techno logical proximity weight matrix. The result shows that this interaction effects can not significantly enhance knowledge spillovers effect.