WILL UNIFIED CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT LEADS TO GREATER KNOWLEDGE SPILLOVER? -EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

摘要

Universities are the creator and transmitter of knowledge and technology, and their R&D activities have positive externalities which could enhance regional innovation by knowledge spillover, thus making it vital to the regional economic development. However, different from the innovation system of developed countries, the universities in China are still under the intensified control of the government, which are regarded as an obstacle to innovation due to their corruption and bureaucracy. Despite increasing attention to the role of government to firms' innovation performance, few studies have explicitly shed light on its impact to universities. Drawing on knowledge spillover theory, this study established a model to examine the moderating effect of the governmental actions to the knowledge spillover effect of the universities, and provided a clear interpretation with empirical evidence to the knowledge spillover mechanism of the universities in China. This study utilized two different proxies to investigate the innovation performance of industrial enterprises by measuring the patent application number (intermediate outcome) and the new product sales volume (end outcome). Based on the improved Cobb-Douglas knowledge production function, the research took the ratio of planned economy as the proxy variable of the intensity of government's control. On the basis of the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2003 to 2008, we used GLS with fixed effect model to examine whether unified control from the government will enhance or impede the knowledge spillover of universities. This study find that the unified control of government had a positive moderating effect towards the knowledge spillover of universities in terms of both patent application number and new product sales volume of industries, thus in turn leading to greater innovation performance in enterprises. The result is robust using different rate of depreciation of R&D capital. These findings indicated that the unified control of the government enhanced the knowledge spillover of universities and improved the regional innovation performance through scale effect at the early stage of emerging economies. Former researches tended to consider government as an obstacle to innovations, but this study showed an exception to the field that the unified control of government may not hinder innovations at the beginning. At the early stages of emerging economies, innovation capability could be promoted rapidly when resources were pooled by unified control of government. Even so, if developing countries are to become developed countries, they still need to gradually improve their innovation system. At the later period of the development of emerging economies, the regional innovation performance may suffer because of the marginal effect decrease of only focusing on short-term profits. Therefore, the universities are still needed to increase their autonomy to make use of the moderating effect of the market itself, and improve the innovation performance via diversified and open innovation activities.