The Effect Of Basic Research On Technological Progress

As a late-developing country in the technology world, technology innovation andtechnology import are the main ways for technological progress. In recent years, theamount of technology increases a lot because of the huge domestic research investmentand abroad technology spillover. However, the quality of technological progress is still low.Hence, if we want to improve our technology progress condition, we must not only rely onincreasing the research amount, but also on adjusting our research structure. At present, themain unreasonable aspect of our research structure is the low intensity of basic researchinvestment. But we face severe resource and technology limits as a developing country, it’sstill unclear whether basic research will bring us technological progress.After going through all the relative papers,we summarize the mechanism of how basicresearch influences technological progress as follows: the effects of knowledge spillover,the effects of human capital enhancement and the effects of technology instrumentationcreation. On this basis, we make statistic analysis with developed countries’ basic researchdata and get three little discoveries. First of all, civilian wealth accumulation is the base ofbasic research and stabilization of economic development is necessary assurance of basicresearch investment. Second of all,the smaller the technology gap, the more effective basicresearch can affect technology progress. The last one, China is on the route of catching upwith high-technology countries, it’s a “prime period” for basic research accumulation. Butcomparing with other developing countries,our basic research level is still low.At last, this paper empirically find out that basic research has a positive effect ontechnological progresses through knowledge spillover, human capital enhancement andtechnology instrumentation creation and the effect is different across regions. The furtherstudy shows that insufficiency of basic research investment makes those areas lack theability of absorbing new technology, but too much basic research investment will causepush-out and resource-wrongly-relocation problem.These can have a negative effect ontechnology innovation. As for China, it’s hard for basic research to have a positive effecton technology progress through technology innovation and technology import and the optimal range of the intensity of basic research investment is0.058to0.084. At present,the intensity of basic research investment’s increase will help technology innovation andtechnology import to promote technological progress positively.