Coordinated Development of Innovation System in China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt, a Demand and Supply Perspective

Yang Zhang,Dezhong Duan,Debin Du

doi:10.3390/su13010178

Yang Zhang, Dezhong Duan + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010178

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Dec 27, 2020
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: East China Normal University

Abstract

The Development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is not only a major regional coordination development strategy in China but also a core carrier supporting China’s innovation-driven development. Under this background, this paper explored the evolution, spatial difference, and coordination development of the regional innovation system in the period of 2007 to 2017 from the demand and supply perspective. We found that, during the study period, the development level of the innovation demand subsystem (IDS) and innovation supply subsystem (ISS), as well as their coordinated development, all showed an increasing trend. The development gap of IDS and the coordinated development among cities in YREB was quite balanced, while there existed a large gap among cities in YREB in the development of ISS. The development of IDS was better than the development of ISS in most of the cities of YREB, indicating that the innovation development of cities in YREB needs supply-side structural reform urgently. Most cities in YREB were at the moderately or slightly uncoordinated development phase, and Shanghai was the only city with coordinated development between IDS and ISS. This paper enriches the regional innovation system from a new perspective, the demand and supply perspective, as well as providing suggestions for the coordinated development of the regional innovation system in YREB.

Highlights

The contribution and mechanism of innovation in national economic growth has constantly been revealed since the pioneering work of Schumpeter [1]
Political stability is a kind of institutional environment factor that can greatly shape the innovation activities and performance [72,73], and because that the cities we studied are under the same political stability environment, this institutional factor was not taken into consideration
The above figures show that the development of innovation demand subsystem (IDS) among cities in Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) were relatively equal, the development gap showed a slight expanding tendency

Summary

Introduction

The contribution and mechanism of innovation in national economic growth has constantly been revealed since the pioneering work of Schumpeter [1]. Under the context of economic globalization, the flow of innovation resources gradually broke through the national boundaries, and many spatial agglomerations appeared. The research framework of the national innovation system cannot fully explain the emergence of regional industrial clusters and regional innovation networks; the regional innovation system was proposed. In the process of developing from national innovation system to regional innovation system, innovation economics and innovation system research were combined with the study about regional science, spatial economics, and economic geography, and the importance of regional difference and local initiative in the evolution of innovation system was gradually been recognized. With regard to the evaluation of regional innovation system, many index systems mainly consisting of innovation environment, innovation actors, and innovation performance that measure development level of regional innovation system are constructed [5,6,7]

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