Research On Spatial Convergence Of China's Regional Innovation Efficiency From The Perspective Of Value Chain

Since the reform and opening up, China’s economy is growing rapidly. At the same time, the gap of economic development between regions is also expanding rapidly, the unbalanced development of regional economy has become an important factor which restricting the healthy development of the national economy. How to narrow the gap to promote the coordinated development of regional economy has become an important issue of public concern. Innovation is the endogenous driving force of economic growth, the difference of regional innovation ability also determines the level of regional economic development in a large extent. In this case,if the regional innovation capacity tends to converge, it means that we could open up a new way for narrowing the gap of areas’ economic. That is, by narrowing the regional innovation gap to achieve the purpose of regional economic convergence.The influence of innovation value chain can not be ignored in the study of the convergence of innovation ability. In fact, with the continuous improvement of technological innovation, the competition of different regional’s innovation ability has turned to the competition of the whole value chain innovation ability. As the innovation process is a value chain more than one stage, from knowledge creation to apply the results of multi factor input and output, the process of innovation should be divided into the application of multiple interrelated processes, such as innovative research and innovation achievements. These links are independent of each other, and they are connected with each other to form a complete innovation value chain. Not only that, in different links of innovation activities, due to the difference between the input, output and environmental conditions, which will lead to differences in innovation ability. If we ignore the internal structure and operating mechanism of the innovation system, and regarded the innovation process as a black box, we would not fully display the characteristics of the regional innovation activities, which also affects the accuracy of the conclusions. Therefore, this article pays attention to the value chain of innovation, firstly divides the innovation process into the innovative research stage and the innovation application stage, on this basis examine the convergence of regional innovation ability of Chinese.Based on analyzing the panel data of 30 provinces in China during 2001-2012,this paper divides the technology innovation process into R&D innovation stage and economic transformation stage,uses data envelopment analysis (dea) method to measure the provinces’ R&D efficiency and economic transformation efficiency.What is more,this paper also adopts the spatial econometric analysis methods to test whether the China’s innovation efficiency is convergent in various stages during the innovation process. The result shows that the R&D efficiency of each province is higher, the efficiency of economic transformation is relatively low; In 2001-2006, the spatial correlation of R&D efficiency is weak, and there was a significant spatial correlation between R&D innovation efficiency in 2007-2012 and economic transformation efficiency in 2001-2012; the efficiency of each stage exists both absolute β convergence and conditional β convergence characteristics. Besides the convergence speed of R&D efficiency is faster than economic transformation efficiency.