Abstract
To promote the National Mid-andLong-Term Scientific and Technical Development Program, utilizing the technical innovation data from 30 provinces of China from2002–2016, this paper evaluates the inter-provincial differences of China’s regional innovation efficiency from four aspects of technical efficiency, efficiency index change, returns to scale, and projection analysis by using the DEA-Malmquist index method and constructs of the DEA-Tobit random response model to explore the impact of government funding on regional innovation efficiency. The research results show that: (1) The local development of regional innovation efficiency in China is unbalanced, and the level of pure technical efficiency restricts the improvement of innovation efficiency. (2) In the prophase of the scientific and technical development plan, technological progress has led to the growth of total factor productivity, resulting in the formation of scale effect; in the later stage, the scale return shows an overall increasing trend, and the continuous expansion of technological scale and opportunities has improved the regional innovation efficiency. (3) The R&D fiscal and tax subsidies have policy sustainability, and the direct government funding can significantly improve innovation efficiency, while the enterprises investment is opposite, and the pretax additional deduction has a negative but not significant impact. The government should give priority to direct subsidy and supplemented by tax preference, making reasonable policy allocations to expand the policy effect.
Highlights
In the early 1950s, Solow [1] proposed that innovation is the power source of economic growth
The regression of this paper adopts the truncated Tobit random effect model combined with the characteristics of efficiency data, which conforms to the right broken tail distribution
The coefficient of Gov is positive in each column and significant at the level of 5%, which means that direct government funding for technology research and development (R&D) can improve innovation efficiency; the Pri coefficient is negative in each column and significant at the level of 1%, which shows that enterprises’ investment in technology R&D has a negative impact on innovation efficiency, and the direct subsidy of R&D financial policy has an overall effect on innovation efficiency
Summary
In the early 1950s, Solow [1] proposed that innovation is the power source of economic growth. In order to develop the new strategy of “improving independent innovation and building an innovative country”, governments at all levels have vigorously supported technological innovation in high-tech industries. Technological innovation is a project with slow return on investment, high investment cost, and high risk. This quasi-public goods attribute can very cause technology spillover, which makes technological innovation lack initiative in both talent incentive and financing constraints. In order to solve the market failure caused by slow market development and innovation activities, the government plays an important role in coordinating local competitiveness and innovation [2,3].
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