| Since the co-ordination of regional development strategy has been put forward, the differences in regional growth has been the core problem of China's regional research for a very long time. Scholars, both domestic and abroad, have made abundant of research on the driving factors of regional economic differences. However, few systematic studies has been made on the regional differences of innovation. The spread of technological resources and relative innovation activity are the ultimate causes of regional differences in economy. Therefore, this thesis is going to deal with these questions:How to identify the factors causing regional difference in innovation, how to accelerate the development of innovation ability in undeveloped areas, and how to promote the coordinating development of regional economy and find its interior driving forces in China?Nowadays, with increasingly perfection of regional differences theory, especially after the birth of new economic geography theory, scholars not only took note of the interactive links of production, technological spillover, spatial increasing returns, i.e. capital/technology externalities contributing to the formation of regional economic differences, inside region, but also discussed the relative relation of geographical spillover and regional economic differences based on the spillover of regional economic growth. But in the existing research on regional innovation, none paid attention to regional innovation differences in the viewpoint of geographical space. Just like economic activity, innovation activities are essentially procedures of input and output. The innovation links and mutual spillover among regions caused a non-equivalent development of regional innovatioa For example, innovation links and knowledge spillover within the region will generate increasing returns of innovation in the spatial level, then cause geographical agglomeration of innovation and regional differences. The interregional spillover of innovative knowledge will lead to spatial interaction created by regional innovative behavior, make polarization diffusion effects, and form hot or cold regional clusters of innovation across administrative boundaries. Innovation behavior gathering in a few regions or forming clusters across regions is an important spatial performance formulated by regional innovation differences. Therefore, not only the research on regional economic disparities, but also the research on regional innovation differences whose main purposes are producing knowledge, must take geographical space as a basic starting point.Based on the data of regional innovation activities, combining theoretical discussion with case study, using relative theories of new economic geography and spatial measurement method, this research made a thorough study on time-space model of non-equivalent development of regional innovation and knowledge spillover and geographical spillover in the two-dimension viewpoint of time-space and intra-and inter-regional spatial levels. There are three core topics in this study:first, analyzing regional knowledge spillover, innovation interactive links and regional innovation differences; Second, discussing inter-regional knowledge spillover, innovation geographic spillover and regional innovation differences; third, explaining spatial club convergence of innovation spatial interaction and regional innovation disparities in a dynamic viewpoint.The paper systematically sorted out the relative research of regional difference in home and abroad, pointed out the next research directions of regional innovation differences, and analyzed geographical agglomeration and spatial clusters of regional innovation in China. It is evident of geographical agglomeration of regional distribution of innovation activities in China. Compared with the general economic activities, innovation activities tend to higher agglomeration than economic ones, and geographical agglomeration of innovation has cumulative features under multiple spatial scales. As for the spatial clusters, the differences in regional innovation are shown not only in the geographical concentration of innovation activities, but also in clustering distribution of regional innovation layout. First, one significant feature of innovation activity distribution of every provinces and cities is innovation development of adjacent provinces in the same sub-bit area; second, the pile distribution of regional innovation clusters is still more apparent in district-level spatial scales. In general, as an input-output process, the cumulative characteristics of geographical concentration of innovation activities, which have higher geographical agglomeration degree than economic activities, may mean there are certain relative relations between the interaction links of inter-regional innovation production, knowledge spillover and regional innovation disparity in China. While considering the importance of external environment to regional innovation development, this spatial correlation structure of pile distribution of regional innovation shows innovation spatial interaction may be another causes of regional innovation development in China.On the basis of previous theoretical literature review and later analysis, this study, taking geographic space as research perspective, sort out two spillover behaviors of innovation interaction which lead to regional innovation disparity:one is knowledge spillovers within the region and innovation overflow; another is inter-regional knowledge spillovers and innovation geographic overflow. Different from traditional research only paying attention to the different effect of distance decay of knowledge spillover on innovation geographic agglomeration, in this study, knowledge spillover within regions is given a new meaning, which believed that just like increasing returns of economic space, knowledge spillover within regions and innovation interaction would create innovation increasing returns. In addition to the agglomerating effect of factor mobility, all these will lead to regional innovation in many different ways. The main concern of this study is not overall spillover effect of regional innovation geographic spillover influenced by inter-regional knowledge spillover, but analysis on the effects of various spatial interaction of innovation on regional innovation disparity in China.At first, the analysis on regional knowledge spillover, innovation interaction and regional innovation disparity shows that:Firstly, traditional factors of supply-demand and policy still make effect on regional innovation disparity, and the differences of human or capital investment scale can cause non-balanced development of regional innovation.Secondly, using the patent, the most representative element of showing the condition of regional innovation development, as explanatory variables, the spillover factors of innovation interaction are more convincing. This also explains the significance of systematically discussing the causes of regional disparity from the angle of innovation interaction spillovers.Thirdly, from the perspective of dynamic agglomeration, the different spillover environment of innovation interaction within a region has a cumulative cycling effect on regional innovation disparities in China.Fourthly, from the industrial perspective, there is close relationship between regional knowledge spillovers, innovation interaction and various industrial innovation activities.As far as analyzing the relation between the regional knowledge spillovers, geographical spillover of innovation and the regional differences of innovation was concerned, the elements of innovation differences has been expanded from inner-region to outside in this research. Starting from the outside relative environment of regional innovation and using exploratory spatial data analysis methods, the author explained the theoretical and practical contribution to regional disparity of multiple spatial interactions of innovation under the influences of geographic distance, innovation development phase and knowledge absorption capacity of regions, etc. The conclusion has been made as follows:Firstly, the regional innovation is spilling from the overall spillover effects of spatial relevance of regional innovation in China, but this spillover effect is obviously influenced by geographical distance. Because of the different distance of regions from innovation growth pole, there may be different performance in innovation development:with the increasing of distance, innovation spillover is decreasing. In another words, it can be proved that diversifying geographic spillover of innovation has made a contributive effect on the regional innovation disparity under the influence of some elements, such as geographic distance.Concerning the local characters of regional innovation spillovers, the structure of China's regional innovation spillovers, no matter in the province scale or the prefecture-level city scale, presents different features. Due to having realized the stage of polarized development as well as being apt at absorbing new knowledge, innovation of the provinces within the eastern region integrated closely and spills over positively with each other. In contrast, among provinces of the central and western regions, which are considered less innovative, innovation coordination performances are weak, and few positive and spatial innovation spillovers are identified. As results, provinces whose innovation level is underdeveloped are inferior to the eastern innovative province in the external innovation environment. In addition, the variation of innovation spillovers highly is consistent with the uneven spatial pattern of innovation capability in China among the prefecture-level cities. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the regional inequality is not only affected by geographic distance, but also by the diverse regional innovation spillovers. Influenced by the stage of regional economic development and knowledge absorption capability, the regular variation of spatial innovation spillovers shows that the inequality of regional innovation in China inevitably relates to the diversity of spatial innovation spillovers.Concerning the spillovers among the adjacent provinces, the development level of innovation is primarily at the stage of polarizing between the eastern regions and central regions or western regions. Eastern provinces adjacent to the central regions acquire positive spillover from the flow of personnel and information, while the central provinces were in the disadvantage of diverse spillovers. In a word, the spatial patterns of innovation spillovers between neighboring provinces are still in favor of the development of the economy prosper provinces。Finally, in from the temporal dimension, the study adopts the locational dependent factors as the regional grouping standards of the club convergence research, and empirically studies the regional innovation convergence process by spatial econometrical model of measurable geographic spatial effects. The findings are as follow:In China mainland, the regional innovation inequality doesn't present dynamic single steady-state convergent characters. In contrary, different from the classical hypothesis that the backward regions can keep higher rate of development in the long term, the regional innovation inequality diverges overall. However, in view of groups with similar internal spatial dependent modes, although the inequality of regional innovation is widening, these groups converge gradually and forma convergent club with characteristic innovation space.As to the contribution of innovation geographic spillovers, the convergent features of regional innovation difference in China imply that like the inequality of the economic level, single steady-state convergence of regional innovation does exist, but the areas in different groups with similar spatial dependent patterns achieve relative convergence in multiple of steady-states. Meanwhile, the empirical results of club convergence among regions with similar spatial dependent patterns show that geographic spillover factors contribute to the multiple steady-state convergence of regional innovation inequality in China. It can be said that the features of overall differentiation and local multi-steady-state of regional innovation in China are inseparated from the geographic spillovers of innovation.Given the different groups, factors of geographic spillovers contribute differently to the dynamic spatial convergence of regional innovation unevenness. A larger lambda of the areas in high-high groups shows that due to more capable of absorbing knowledge and technologies, geographic spillovers of innovation play more significant roles in reduce inequality in these groups.
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