6,773 research outputs found

    Managing the interface between public sector applied research and technological development in the Chinese enterprise sector

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    China's technological capabilities are emerging rapidly and the country will become a major challenger to established nations in terms of R&D and innovation in the near future. For the moment, however, contradictory signals emerge from the Chinese economy leaving experts pondering about the country's true potential for technological upgrading on a broad scale. The integration of the domestic research system, international technology transfer, and technological development remains limited to a few high-tech companies, while large segments of the domestic private sector have limited access to knowledge and technologies to upgrade their activities. --China,Guangdong,interface,knowledge supply,knowledge demand,regional innovation system,science-industry relations

    China's Integration with the World: Development as a Process of Learning and Industrial Upgrading

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    The process of development is full of uncertainties, especially if it is a process of transition from a planned economy to a market oriented one. Because of uncertainties and country specificity, development must be a process of learning, selective adaptation, and industrial upgrading. This paper attempts to distill lessons from China's reform and opening up process, and investigate the underlying reasons behind China's success in trade expansion and economic growth. From its beginnings with home-grown and second-best institutions, China has embarked on a long journey of reform, experimentation, and learning by doing. It is moving from a comparative advantage-defying strategy to a comparative advantage-following strategy. The country is catching up quickly through augmenting its factor endowments and upgrading industries; but this has been only partially successful. Although China is facing several difficult challenges -- including rising inequality, an industrial structure that is overly capital and energy intensive, and related environmental degradation -- it is better positioned to tackle them now than it was 30 years ago. This paper reviews the drivers behind China's learning and trade integration and provides both positive and negative lessons for developing countries with diverse natural endowments, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa.patterns of trade; learning; innovation and growth

    The effect of import competition on firm productivity and innovation: does the distance to technology frontier matter?

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    How does foreign competition affect growth and innovation in China? Using our unique measures of proximity of Chinese firms and industries to the world technology frontier, we find that despite vast sectoral heterogeneity, Chinese manufacturing industries have undergone rapid technological upgrading over the period of 2000–06. The distance to the world production frontier of firms and industries plays an important role in shaping the nexus between the competition pressure from foreign imports and domestic firms' growth and innovation behaviour. Our results support the theoretical predictions of Aghion et al. (2005, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, pp. 701–728) that import competition stimulates the domestic firms' productivity growth and R&D expenditure if firms and their industries are close to the world frontier, but discourages such incentives for laggard firms and industries. The two forces highlighted by the model operate for imports under the ordinary-trade regime, for collective and private firms, and for imports originated from high-income countries. Our findings are robust after controlling the influence of foreign investment, the reverse causality of regressors and the short-term business cycle fluctuations

    Who benefits from investment in universities? : institutions, university spillovers, and firm performance

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    Thesis (S.M. in Management Research)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-43).This study examines the impact of local institutional arrangements on firm level spillover effects from universities. Specifically, I test the proposition of co-location with universities affecting firm performance, taking advantage of a major policy reform in China, to identify distinct university-influenced regions between 1998 and 2005. Together with a unique dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, I find evidence, which suggests that relative to state-owned enterprises, domestic private firms in these regions experienced performance decline. Collectively, the results suggest that spillover effects from universities on industry are not unidirectional and uniform, and are specific to the unique institutional arrangements of each region and country. This finding raises some substantial welfare implications about the efficiency of public investments in universities when the benefits of such investments are offset by the institutional inefficiency of the state ownership.by Kenny Hwee Ching.S.M.in Management Researc

    Essays on mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in economic development

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    This thesis examines the channels and mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in the context of economic development. Technological progress is critical for a country's sustainable growth and for the successful transition of a country from imitation to innovation. Therefore, to clarify the main channels and mechanisms driving the accumulation of knowledge and technologies in an economy contributes to an understanding of the sources of economic growth. The specific aspects of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading covered in the thesis include inter-sectoral industrial upgrading, the intensification of R&D activities, a country's tapping into foreign sources of knowledge, and a country's changing position in the global value chain. In studying these channels and mechanisms, in-depth theoretical discussion and quantitative methods are applied. In terms of theoretical discussion, the thesis covers many issues relating to the factors contributing to technological progress and draws our attention to the key aspects of such progress. In terms of quantitative methods, advanced econometric methods such as Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), the estimator from Kyriazidou (1997), the Heckman two-step estimator, the Tobit and Probit estimators and various instrumental variable estimators are employed to address different econometric issues and data structures in model estimations. The thesis finds evidence of the critical role of institutional quality in promoting the productive use of scarce tertiary human capital, in stimulating the Research and Development (R&D) investment of firms, and in attracting R&D investment in host countries by multinational enterprises. The thesis also reveals the importance of human capital as an essential input to the process of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading. A case study of Chinese manufacturing firms clarifies the determinants of firm-level R&D investment, which helps us understand and predict the prospects for innovation in the Chinese economy. By linking firm-level production and customs datasets, the thesis probes into the important question of how trade participation affects innovation in the context of the Chinese economy, which is an especially interesting case due to the huge contribution from trade to China's growth miracle to date. The findings draw attention to processing trade and suggest that under some circumstances deep and long-term engagement in processing trade may adversely influence the R&D investment and innovation prospect of firms. This point reflects the difficulty of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in a world where global production sharing continues to deepen. Based on the results of empirical and quantitative analyses, several policy suggestions are proposed. These include (1) enhancing institutional quality to accompany other growth-promoting policies, (2) encouraging individual and household-level investment in human capital, (3) nurturing domestic R&D stock and research talents at relatively early stages of development and (4) looking beyond the direct targets of industrial and trade policies to take into account the implications for technological catch-up and industrial upgrading when making such policies. The thesis also points out some directions for future research to extract from the dynamics of the world economy those channels and mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading yet unclarified by this thesis

    How Different Kinds of Innovation Affect Trade Performance of Enterprises in China?

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    The authors greatly acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Education, P.R., China for the major research project “A Study on the Transformation of China’s Outward Pattern of Economic Development (13JJD790021)”. Abstract The paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of the different kinds of technological innovation on export performance of Chinese manufacturing industries. To do this, we distinguish between different dimensions of innovation activities including R&D intensity, innovation capability, invention intensity, skill intensity, foreign technology and new product development, and examine their distinct impact on industrial export. The fixed-effect and instrumental variable (IV) regression methods have been applied on a panel dataset of China’s two-digit manufacturing industries over the 1998-2013 period.  The results indicate that R&D intensity and innovation capability are significant determinants of export performance in China while the effect that innovation capability have made on export is greater than R&D intensity. In addition, invention intensity, skill intensity and foreign technology have broadly accelerated the export performance of China’s manufacturing industries. However, skill intensity and foreign technology have the relatively stronger effect on export among different kinds of innovation indicators. Furthermore, Chinese exports have greatly benefitted from the activities which are linked to the new product development. Our result reveal that China’s inclusion into WTO in 2002 has been a stimulating factor for country’s trade liberalisation process. These results are robust to several tests and sensitivity checks, as well as alternative measures on various channels of technological innovation. The evidence has significant policy lessons for China and other emerging countries. Keywords: R&D, Innovation output, Invention intensity, New product development, Foreign Technology transfer, Export performance DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-10-07 Publication date:May 31st 201

    China’s 40-year Road to Innovation

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    Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the evolution of policies and practice of innovation in China for the past 40 years. Design/methodology/approach This is a review paper. It adopts a different multi-dimensional, qualitative methodology to examine China’s trajectory of innovation from the economic reform since 1978, highlighting ‘China’ experiences in the developing innovation-driven economy, also pointing the challenges that China faces in this transition process and future prospects. The analysis of China’s innovation performance was based mostly on secondary data from sources and institutions that use statistical data to build country rankings, such as Global Innovation Index (GII) and Global Competitiveness Index (GCI). Findings It is found that the institutional foundations of national innovation system in China are already being laid, and so far, China has made extraordinary progress regarding innovation performance from country to region and from business to individual. However, some critical challenges in its innovation-driven development still need urgent attention and effective efforts to reinforce them. Originality/value This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by providing an overview of the evolution of the policies and practices of innovation development in China since the 1978 economic reforms, and explores the Chinese experiences in transforming into an innovation-driven economy

    Chinese regional innovation systems in times of crisis: the case of Guangdong

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    The dynamic economic development of Guangdong province is one of the most prominent examples of China's catch-up in the course of the past two decades. Once chosen as the nation's first experimental field for the market economy, the province continued to participate above average in national economic growth ever since. Up to today, it maintains a leading position with regard to general industrial performance and average personal income. As China's industry begins to embark on a path of technological up-grading, however, this pre-eminent position begins to be challenged. In the nation's emerging fields of strength, the province's rivals, Beijing and Shanghai, are in a better starting position since they are better endowed with both R&D capacities and qualified human capital. In this context, our paper illustrates the resulting challenges by means of a number of specialized indicators and explains why, despite a continously impres-sive export performance in the high-tech sectors, Guangdong is far from well prepared to maintain its current position. Finally, it briefly describes the policy responses that have been developed, concluding that despite clear evidence of progress some key issues with regard to regional innovation policy appear to remain unaddressed. --

    Regional Innovative Capacity in China: From the Perspective of Embedded Autonomy

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    Innovation is widely considered as the core driver of nations\u27 economic growth and competitiveness. Since the start of economic reform in 1978, the provincial governments in China have gained much autonomy, which has led to the co-existence of multi-level innovation systems, national innovation system and regional (provincial) innovation system. With the economic development and social progress, the disparities in innovative capacity (I C) among regions in China are becoming increasingly larger. Considering the unique innovation context of China and drawing upon the research on IC, this paper proposed to employ theories of embedded autonomy and governed interdependence, which was developed to explain the institutional relationships based on newly industrialized Asia countries, to investigate the reason of variations of regional innovative capacity in China

    Human Capital, Education, and Entrepreneurs: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta

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    This paper seeks to examine the relationship between education demand and entrepreneurs in the process of enhancing the growth of human capital in China. We develop a theoretical model that incorporates the important roles played by human capital, education and entrepreneurs. Then, we derive an immigration condition under which the demand for education depends on the existence of entrepreneurs. Finally, we test whether this condition holds true in China, using a panel data set from the Yangtze River Delta which is considered a key barometer of Chinese economy. The empirical results reveal a significant positive relationship between entrepreneurs and education demand in the Yangtze River Delta, suggesting that if we can find ways to promote the growth of entrepreneurial endeavors, we could spur the growth of education demand and further drive human capital accumulation in China
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