| Research and Development (R&D) not only drives enterprises to create new technologies, it also provides an indispensable condition for them to absorb advanced technology from outside. Owing to such a mechanism, different countries and regions would promote technology convergence via R&D activities. This article empirically analyses the productivity convergence in China’s High-technology industries based on the province-industry level panel data during1995to2010, considering the effect of R&D and technology transfer, and their co-effect. It finds that R&D plays an important role on the technology transfer thus helping raising the productivities of those backward provinces while innovation effect through R&D does not exist significantly. However, the results are not in accord with the firm level analysis from the Database of China Industrial Enterprises. We find that R&D could directly raise the productivity in China’s High-technology industry weakly, but negatively influenced by outside R&D. We build a two-period game model in order to explain such inconsistency via congestion effect and competition effect. |
