Government Support, Different Types of R&D Collaborations Input and Output: Evidence from China

Abstract

Given the increasing university industry collaboration as the source of innovation, the studies on the effect of subsidies and tax incentives on university-research institute-industry collaboration (URIC) innovation have received wide attention recently. This study empirically investigated whether the government R&D subsidies (e.g. to university, research institute, and enterprise) and tax incentives stimulate the input and output of URIC, using a panel data from China Statistical Yearbook in 30 provinces from 2009 to 2015. We set up a series of quantitative models of the government subsidies and tax incentives on R&D collaboration input and output. The results showed that the government subsidies to university, research institute, enterprise, and tax incentives all had a significantly positive effect on input and output of URIC. The government subsidies to university and to research institute have a significant positive effect on the university-industry collaboration input and research institute-industry collaboration input respectively. There is an inverted U relationship between government subsidy and collaboration input. The effects on output in the descending order are government subsidies to university, subsidies to research institute, subsidies to enterprise, and tax incentives successively. The effect of subsidy on URIC input is smaller than that of tax incentive, whereas the subsidy on output is bigger than that of tax incentives. In addition, the results also suggested that the impact of enterprises' expenditure to university on output is larger than that to research institute.