The Impact Of Internet Development On Regional Innovation Capability And Its Mechanism

China's economy has entered a new era of high-quality development.It is of great significance and urgency to speed up the construction of an innovation-oriented country and enhance the ability of independent innovation,while strengthening the regional innovation capability is an important link and the inevitable choice.At present,the new generation of information and communication technology(ICT)represented by the Internet is changing with each passing day,deeply integrated into economic and social development,which profoundly changs the way of production and life style.The Party and the government of China have always attached great importance to the development and application of the Internet.The "Internet+" has been incorporated into the top-level design,and has become an important driving force for the transformation and innovation of China's economic.Regarding the relationship between the Internet and regional innovation,there is a preliminary discussion on the literature,but there are still deficiencies in the research content and methods.This paper takes whether and how Internet development affects regional innovation capability as the theme,and examines the overall effect,locational heterogeneity effect(i.e.differences in marginal effects at different geographical locations),direct effect and indirect effect of Internet development on regional innovation capability in China.On the one hand,on the basis of reviewing and commenting on relevant literatures,this paper analyzes the relationship between Internet development and regional innovation capability,and divides the basic role of Internet to regional innovation into two functions:processing information and connecting subjects.This paper analyzes the mediating effect of Internet development on regional innovation capability from the aspects of technology market and entrepreneurial activity,and further analyzes the indirect effect from the perspective of technology market intermediary,entrepreneurial activity intermediary and input-output efficiency of regional innovation.On the other hand,based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2016,this paper measures the Internet development index,the static efficiency and dynamic efficiency of regional innovation,mainly uses the dynamic panel model to empirically test the impact of Internet development on regional innovation capability and its mechanism.The empirical research in this paper finds:First,the development of Internet has significantly promoted the enhancing of regional technological development capability and regional innovation transformation capability in China.This effect is significant in the eastern region and the central and western regions,but the Internet development has a more significant and strong role in promoting innovation ability in the central and western regions.Second,the impact of Internet development on regional innovation capability has the mediating effect of technology market and entrepreneurial activities.That is,Internet development can positively impact regional innovation capability by promoting the development of technology market or improving the level of entrepreneurship.Third,the Internet development has a significant role in promoting regional innovation technology efficiency,and the promotion effect is obviously greater in the central and western regions than that in the eastern region.Fourth,the Internet development has a significant positive impact on the growth rate of regional innovation total factor productivity(TFP),which is achieved by promoting innovation technological progress and improving innovation pure technical efficiency;the results in the central and western regions are consistent with the overall results,and the Internet development in the eastern region has a negative impact on the dynamic efficiency index of innovation including TFP,technological progress and pure technological efficiency change,which reflects the marginal diminishing of the driving effect of the Internet on innovation in the more developed regions;Moreover,whether at the national level,or in the eastern region and the central and western regions,the Internet development has a depressing effect on the scale efficiency of regional innovation.The innovative work of this paper mainly includes:(1)It supplements and improves the measurement indicators of the level of the Internet development.This paper uses the perpetual inventory method to calculate the Internet capital stock,and measures the level of the Internet policy by searching the key words in newspapers of the provincial party committees.Thus,it provides a new perspective to understand and quantify the development level of the Internet,and on this basis,measures the inter-provincial Internet development index of China;(2)From the perspective of technology market's development and entrepreneurial activity' promotion,this paper analyses and tests the influence channels of Internet development on regional innovation capability,which further enriches the literature in the field of Internet and regional innovation,and deepens the understanding of the mechanism of Internet development on regional innovation capability;(3)Calculating the static efficiency and the dynamic efficiency of regional innovation in China based on DEA-Malmquist productivity index method,empirically examines the impact of Internet development on regional innovation productivity,expands the research on the relationship between Internet and regional innovation efficiency,and deepens the mechanism of Internet development affecting regional innovation capability from the perspective of input-output efficiency;(4)SYS-GMM is used in the quantitative analysis,which takes into account the dynamic adjustment characteristics of regional innovation production activities,which overcomes the endogenous problems caused by missing variables,and is more scientific and reasonable than the static model used in existing researches.