Government Procurement and Enterprise Innovation: Protective Effect and Spillover Effect

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The strategy of innovation-driven development marks that China’s economy has changed from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development. At the same time, it also puts forward new and deeper requirements for financial functions. How to give full play to the leading role of fiscal policy in enterprise innovation and how to use positive fiscal policy to promote economic restructuring have become the focus of the current work of the Chinese government. As an important policy tool on the demand side, government procurement has been used by many countries in Europe and the United States to formulate and implement government procurement policies aimed at promoting innovation. It has also been paid attention to in China very early. With the increasing scale of government procurement, its position and role in the financial policy system cannot be ignored. Therefore, it is a key issue to actively reflect on and promote the formulation of government procurement supporting independent innovation policy that meets the international environmental requirements and effectively reflects the needs of domestic economic restructuring. However, from the theoretical point of view, the research on the actual policy effect of government procurement supporting enterprise independent innovation has not been paid enough attention to, and the relevant research conclusions have not been agreed.Based on the comprehensive consideration of regional policy environment and independent innovation policy factors, this paper empirically examines the relationship between government procurement and enterprise innovation, taking the state of government procurement orders and patent applications obtained by national enterprises from 2015 to 2017 as the research object. The research shows that the policy of government procurement supporting independent innovation has a good effect on the whole level of government procurement. After paying attention to the influence of regional policy environment factors, the implementation of government procurement supporting independent innovation policy has failed to play its due role in the level of local government procurement, showing a “protective effect”; while it has an effective effect on the level of government procurement in other places, showing a “spillover effect”. In promoting the quality of independent innovation of enterprises, the effect of the implementation of government procurement supporting independent innovation policy has the phenomenon of “emphasizing application, despising invention”. In addition to providing direct support for innovation resources, government procurement also shows signaling mechanism to support enterprises’ independent innovation. At the same time, combined with the characteristics of government procurement departments, supplier enterprises and regional characteristics, the mechanism of government procurement supporting independent innovation of enterprises has the characteristics of scale and specialty, and pays more attention to non-listed companies, foreign-funded companies, non-state-owned capital companies and large and medium-sized companies, and there are obvious differences in different regions.The policy implication of this paper is that the premise of the function of government procurement supporting independent innovation policy is to ensure a fair market competition environment for government procurement, and pay attention to maintaining the openness of government procurement market in different regions. At the same time, the function of government procurement supporting independent innovation policy requires government procurement implementing agencies with clear responsibilities, giving full play to professional implementation capabilities, and defining scientific implementation standards.