R&D Capital,Industrial Technology Spillovers And The TFP Of Chinese Industries

Innovation is the source of sustainable economic growth, and it is mainly derived from R&D activities and technology spillover effects. Over the last decade, the TFP of China’s industrial sectors,espeiclly the manufacturing industries, improved rapidly, resulting from increasing R&D investment and good use of technology spillovers. However, papers were focused on the effects of R&D activities to innovations, which rarely paid attentioned to industries technology spillovers, and seldom distinguished between inter-industrial and intra-industrial spillovers for long.Base on New Growth Theory, we compared the mechanisms of inter and intra-industrial spillovers and calculated the R&D capital stocks of36industries. Then we calculated the technical similarity coefficients of each industry as the symbol of inter-indusrial spillover with the help of Chinese input-output tables of1997,2002and2007, as well as the sum of proportions of gross value in the top5provinces as the symbol of intra-industrial spillover. After that, we analyzed the impacts of R&D capital, inter-spillover effect and intra-spillover effect on industrial TFP. In addition, we examinated the impacts of international spillover effect and absorptive capacity.Through the regressions, we found that both inter-industrial and intra-industrial spillovers have significant impacts on industrial TFP, however, the intensity of inter-industrial spillover is much more significant than intra-industial spillover, and even the R&D capital. Besides, in terms of industries, the TFP of low-medium-tech industries is mainly influenced by intra and inter-industrial spillovers, where intra-spillover is more significant; the TFP of high-tech industries is mainly relied on R&D capital, and the inter-industrial spillover has certain influences. Moreover, the impacts of international spillover effect and absorptive capacity are not significant.The political recommendations are as below. Firstly, the government should encourage enterprises to increase R&D investment and intensify research cooperations in order to improve the technical capacity. Secondly, the industries with low-tech should fully use the technology spillovers through industrial clusters and industrial common technology platform ets.,. Thirdly, the industries with high-tech should increase R&D investment to achieve endogenous innovation consistently. In addition, when planning the industrial parks, the government should strengthen the industial cooperation and intensify the technology spillover effect.