Study On The Spatial Discrepancy Of Innovation Performance In Yangtze River Economic Belt-A Perspective Of Governance

With the deepening of globalization and the advent of the knowledge economy, innovation has become the key element for a region to get competitive advantage and driving force of development. At present, China has entered a crucial stage of the 2020 innovation-oriented country, but most of cities is still at the exploratory stage of building the innovation system, with factor-driven rather than innovation-driven. As the heart of Chinese economic development strategic areas, how to drive innovative development of the Yangtze River economic belt is essential to Chinese economic transformation. The local government takes measures to promote innovative development and build the city innovation systems, through financial subsidies, tax incentives and policy guidance etc. But there are debates in political and academic field if the supportive behaviors substantially improve performance of regional innovation systems. This paper selects the Yangtze River economic belt as the study area, analyzes the relationship between innovation performance and government behavior of 110 prefecture-level cities, and make a suggestion for optimizing governance.First of all, this paper reviews literatures about regional innovation system, government behavior, and then summarizes the concept composition and operational mechanism of regional innovation systems. Overall, there are few comparison and empirical studies. Secondly, city innovation systems have been divided into three compositions, consist of innovation subject, innovation environment and innovation resource subsystem. Among, innovation subject subsystem includes the government, universities, firms and agencies. Based on theory of government behavior, this paper clears the role of government in city innovation system. Thirdly, evaluation indicators and research methods are cleared for measuring innovation performance and government behavior. And city innovation system model is constructed in aspects of resource gathering and innovation generating. Government behavior model consists of administrative efficiency, financial support and intellectual property protection. Finally, this paper studies the relationship between innovation performance and government behavior of 110 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River economic belt.The results show that:at the stage of resource gathering, economic and social environment play a more important role than ecological environment, which maybe the reason of talents’ economic man property; at the stage of innovation generating, compared to development zone, the influences of talents and capital are more; at two stages, both the innovation performance appear’east high west low’ spatial discrepancy in Yangtze River economic belt, and the eastern cities, the capitals and major cities of the central and western provinces are the highlands of innovation; there is polarization in resource-using efficiency of central and western cities, some cities actively use the limited human and material resources to promoting innovation, but part of the cities are restricted path lock-in; local governance behavior has a positive impact on innovation performance improvement, especially of administrative efficiency and financial support; the effect of government behavior in developed and middle-developed cities is more prominent, while there is quite different in less-developed cities.