| How to land and effectively implement the innovation-driven development strategy is an important issue in achieving China’s economic transformation and high-quality development.At present,the internal cycle of China’s economy is being continuously improved,and the high-quality development of the economy requires a shift in growth momentum from investment-driven to innovation-driven,while there are challenges of uncoordinated and unbalanced regional economic development,so the implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy is crucial to the high-quality development of China’s economy.Since the reform and opening up,development zones have played an important role as a platform to carry the national development strategy and drive regional economic growth,while at this stage,promoting the construction and innovation transformation of development zones has become an important support to realise the innovation-driven strategy.As the reform deepens,the construction of development zones has focused on innovation development.One of the development goals of development zones is to become a leader and demonstration zone for science and technology innovation,and in terms of innovation drive,state-level development zones,represented by high-tech industrial development zones,have become the main front for the implementation of the national innovation-driven development strategy.Development zone policy is a typical place-based policy,and the evaluation of its effects is a hot topic of academic research,however,the question of whether place-based policies are effective remains controversial.In recent years,attention to place-based policies has gradually increased in various fields such as development economics,political economy and regional economics.the construction and development of development zones in China have achieved brilliant results and have effectively played a window,demonstration,radiation and driving role in deepening reform and opening-up,but the practice of development zone policies in many developed countries has not lived up to policy expectations.High levels of policy subsidies have brought little benefit,possibly due to distortions in the allocation of market resources as a result of government policy intervention.Does the policy guidance for technological innovation in enterprises lead to ’strategic innovation’ in order to obtain subsidies? Also,the core purpose of development zone policy is to promote technological innovation through the clustering of enterprises,but how effective is this clustering? Or are China’s development zones still relying on "policy rents" to attract firms rather than market forces to guide industrial clustering? These questions deserve more in-depth exploration.Against this background,this paper adopts a theoretical,empirical and mechanistic approach to comprehensively and systematically analyse the technological innovation effects of development zone policies,with a view to providing lessons for the construction of development zones,coordinated regional development and innovation-driven development.Based on the theory of intermediate product innovation,monopolistic competition theory and centre-periphery theory,this paper constructs a theoretical model to analyse the technological innovation promotion effect and spatial interaction spillover effect of the construction of development zones from the perspective of diversification and specialisation clustering.Based on the literature and theoretical discussions,this paper analyses the mechanisms by which the policies of development zones affect the technological innovation of enterprises and their spatial externalities and proposes related hypotheses.Using factual data on the characteristics of China’s development zones and patent distribution data,this paper examines in detail the spatial distribution,economic characteristics and technological innovation advantages of development zones and their spatial and temporal evolution.This paper uses Python programming to obtain the latitude and longitude information corresponding to the address data of listed companies and Chinese industrial enterprises,and uses Bigemap software programming to replicate the scope of the development zones into Baidu maps,thereby obtaining accurate data of the enterprises in the development zones.Based on the above data,this paper empirically estimates the existence of the technological innovation promotion effect of the development zone policy and conducts a series of robustness tests with the help of quasi-natural experiments such as the DID model and the PSM-DID model,and also conducts a systematic and detailed discussion from the perspective of heterogeneity,micro mechanisms and spillover effects.The main findings of this paper are as follows.(1)After nearly forty years of development,the policy system of development zones has been formed,including qualification policies,incentive policies,financing policies,service policies and guarantee policies,with the characteristics of government guidance,financial incentives and policy coherence.The analysis based on the spatial distribution and economic characteristics of the development zones shows that the establishment of the development zones takes into account the principles of efficiency and equity,and to a certain extent,the economic development of the central and western regions while ensuring efficiency.The analysis based on the number of patent application and grant of enterprises in the development zones shows that,the kernel density estimation graph of the number of patents of enterprises in the development zones shows a right skew and higher peak compared with that of non-development zone enterprises,which indicates the existence of the "static advantage" of technological innovation of enterprises in the development zones;The difference between enterprises in the development zone and those outside the development zone shows a trend of enlarging year by year,indicating the existence of "dynamic advantage" of technological innovation of enterprises in the development zone.(2)The theoretical analysis shows that the central area built by the development zone will enhance the probability of successful technological innovation of enterprises through diversified and specialised clustering,which in turn will lead to the improvement of the regional innovation level and the formation of "innovation advantage",while this innovation advantage will generate "spillover effect" with the flow of innovation factors between regions.At the same time,this innovation advantage generates a "spillover effect" with the flow of innovation factors between regions,which interactively promotes the technological innovation development of the surrounding and central regions.This paper incorporates intermediate product innovation into the centre-periphery model,which,on the one hand,theoretically verifies the technological innovation promotion effect of development zone policies,and on the other hand,provides theoretical support for the analysis of the spillover effect mechanism later on.(3)The results of the empirical analysis reveal that,firstly,the establishment of the development zone will promote enterprises’ technological innovation significantly,including a 43.50% increase in patent applications and a 32.17%increase in patent licenses.The establishment of the development zone significantly increases the R&D investment of enterprises,and the increase of invention patents is stronger than that of other patents,which indicates that the policy of the development zone promotes "substantive" innovation rather than "strategic" innovation of enterprises.In addition,the effect of the development zone policy on innovation efficiency is not significant,because the development zone policy promotes invention patents more and optimizes the technological innovation structure of enterprises,while the development of invention patents requires more R&D investment,which reduces the innovation efficiency,thus the overall innovation efficiency is not significantly improved.Secondly,the results of the event study show that the significance of the promotion effect of the establishment of the development zone on enterprise technological innovation shows an increasing trend year by year,which also verifies the existence of the dynamic advantage of enterprise technological innovation in the development zone.Thirdly,in order to further mitigate the sample selection bias,this paper conducts PSM-DID,indicator substitution tests,and excludes the effect of development zone upgrading policies,and further employs the Chinese industrial enterprise database to conduct supplementary tests to avoid the selectivity bias problem and endogeneity problem as much as possible and ensure the robustness of the empirical results.(4)Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect of development zone policies on the promotion of enterprise technological innovation is heterogeneous at the level of the type of development zone,the firm level and the regional level.Firstly,for different types of development zones,on the one hand,the technology innovation promotion effect is higher in national-level development zones than in provincial-level development zones,and on the other hand,the technology innovation promotion effect is higher in national-level high-tech zones than in national-level economic development zones.Secondly,at the regional level,the technological innovation effect is more significant in development zones set up in regions with a combination of industry,academia and research,while the technological innovation effect is much higher in the eastern and central regions than in the northeastern and western regions.Thirdly,in terms of firm attributes,there is no difference in the policy effects brought by the establishment of development zones,suggesting that the policies of development zones have a strong universal effect,especially on the reform and innovation of state-owned enterprises.Further validation of the paper using data on Chinese industrial enterprises also supports these findings.(5)The micro-mechanism analysis reveals that,firstly,policy subsidies have a significant role in promoting technological innovation of enterprises in the zone at the early stage of its establishment.Although the effect of tax incentives on enterprise innovation in development zones is not significant,the combination of tax incentives and government subsidies in development zone policies can produce synergistic effects and significantly promote enterprise technology innovation.Secondly,the agglomeration effect is a long-term mechanism to promote enterprise technology innovation.In the long run,the diversified and specialized clustering of enterprises in the development zones can significantly promote the technological innovation of enterprises.Thirdly,the policies of the development zones significantly promote the technological innovation of enterprises in the development zones by enhancing market competition,export-induced learning,and alleviating financing constraints.(6)The study of the spatial externalities of development zone policies shows that development zones generate technological innovation spillover effects on enterprises in the surrounding areas.The clustering of innovation factors in the development zones generates spillover to neighboring enterprises,which in turn leads to the improvement of innovation levels in the surrounding areas.In addition,the transmission mechanism study shows that the development zone mainly influences the technological innovation level of enterprises outside the development zone through the leading industry leadership,transportation infrastructure improvement and digital economy development.Therefore,this study responds to the question of the "siphon effect" of the development zones from the perspective of enterprise technological innovation,and provides an explanation for the innovation spillover effect of the development zones and the synergistic development mechanism inside and outside the development zones.The above analysis has confirmed the theoretical and empirical validation of the policy effect of the development zone policy in promoting regional innovation advantages and its ability to significantly drive regional innovation development. |
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