数字经济与区域创新——基于融资和知识产权保护的角度

数字经济在中国经济中扮演着越来越重要的角色。文章构建了2011-2018年地级市数字经济发展的综合指标,以专利申请数量来量化区域创新产出,从融资和知识产权保护的角度,研究了数字经济对区域创新的影响。研究发现数字经济显著地促进了区域创新。在进行一系列稳健性检验及采用工具变量控制可能存在的内生性问题后,文章的研究结论依然成立。经济学意义上,数字经济发展水平提高1%,区域创新产出增加1.05%。机制检验发现,数字经济通过缓解创新面临的融资约束和提高知识产权保护水平来促进区域创新。进一步研究发现,数字经济对发明型创新、实用型创新和外观型创新都具有显著的促进作用;虽然数字经济的发展水平在东部和非东部地区存在较大的差异,但是数字经济与区域创新之间的关系在东部地区和非东部地区之间并不存在显著的差异。文章关于数字经济与区域创新之间的关系及其背后机制的研究对构建数字经济时代区域创新体系及实现国家创新驱动发展战略具有重要的理论和现实意义。

Digital Economic and Regional Innovation: From the Perspective of Financing and Intellectual Property Protection

Based on the huge investment in information and communication infrastructure in China, digital technologies obtain rapid development and application. Digital economy is playing an important role in Chinese economy. According to the "China Internet Development Report 2020", the size of China’s digital economy was 35.8 trillion yuan in 2019, accounting for 36.4% of the GDP in 2019. Scholars pay more attention on digital economy. Innovation is one of important and active factor that helps a region obtain competitive advance and achieve economic growth. China has advocated that economic development must be driven by innovation in future and the country will become a world leader in scientific and technological innovation by 2050. Therefore, examining the impact of digital economy on regional innovation can help achieve the goal, namely, constructing the regional innovation system and realizing national innovation driven development strategy. Although several papers have investigated the relationship between digital economy and regional innovation, they endure the following defects. First, these papers fail to correct endogeneous concerns, which make the finding become unbelievable. Second, they use the number of patents grant to measure regional innovation output. The measure is biased because the average time gap between patents application and patents grant is 1.5 years in China. Therefore, the number of patents grant fail to reflect innovation output in the year and the number of patents application is a better indicator of regional innovation output. Finally, these papers argued that digital economy can immediately impact regional innovation output. However, innovation is a risky, idiosyncratic, and long-term process, suggesting that digital economy needs time to affect regional innovation. Based on the mentioned issues, it is necessary to provide more detailed evidence on the association between digital economy and regional innovation. In this paper, using a large sample of Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2011-2018 period, we develop an index of digital economy and use the number of patents application to measure regional innovation output to examine the relationship between digital economy and regional innovation output form the prospective of financing and intellectual property protection. We provide evidence that digital economy has a positive effect on regional innovation. The finding is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. To correctendogeneous concern, we use instrumental variable and 2SLS method to identify a causal relationship between digital economy and regional innovation output. In terms of economic significance, 1% increase in digital economy will increase the number of patent application by approximately 1.05%. Besides, we find that digital economy affects regional innovation by alleviating financing constraint for innovation and improving intellectual property protection. Further, digital economy promotes all types of innovation, namely, invention innovation, utility innovation, and design innovation. Although the development of digital economy in eastern China and non eastern China has a larger difference, the relationship between digital economy and regional innovation is the same in eastern China and non eastern China. This paper has great significance to the construction of regional innovation system and the achievement of the national strategy of innovation-driven development.