Research On The Effect Of Polycentric Development Degree On Regional Innovation Efficiency

Innovation is basically an urban phenomenon in terms of geographical distribution.Urbanization brings about the specialized and diversified environment,the accumulation of human capital,the information exchange network,and the improvement of transaction efficiency,which make technology innovation and diffusion more likely to occur in cities.In recent years,the urbanization rate in China has also been gradually increasing.The distribution of urban system scale has been developing with multi-center and single-center characteristics.However,in some areas with high urbanization rates,the innovation capacity is still weak,and the positive promotion effect of urbanization on technological innovation is not yet very significant.The differences between regions are obvious.At the same time,all regional policies are aimed at attracting population by urbanization in the sense of land,and thus achieving urbanization in the sense of population,making the distribution of urban population deviate from the multi-center degree of urban land distribution.Does this deviation affect regional innovation efficiency? Therefore,from the perspective of spatial development,this paper studies the relationship between the multi-centric characteristics of China's urban distribution and regional innovation efficiency.It is of great significance to accurately grasp the distribution characteristics of China's urban system scale,adjust the path of regional urbanization,and promote the growth of regional innovation efficiency.This paper uses the panel data of 23 provincial administrative regions in China from 1998 to 2014 as a sample to empirically examine the degree of multi-center urban distribution and the influence of multi-center degree deviation on the regional innovation efficiency.Firstly,the scales of 288 prefecture-level cities are depicted by population,land of built-up areas,and brightness of night lights.The multi-centric degrees of 23 provinces are measured by the order-scale law.Secondly,using the number of patents/populations of the municipal districts and the number of patents/land of built-up areas to characterize innovation efficiencies,the knowledge production function model is extended to study the impact of urban multi-centric degree on innovation efficiency from both population and land perspectives.Also,the interaction of Herfindahl index,which characterizes industrial diversity,and the multi-center index are used to explore the mechanism of multi-centricity affecting innovation efficiency.Finally,the multi-centric index of actual economic activities is measured by population of municipal district and the nighttime light intensity,and multi-centric index dominated by land policy is calculated with land of built-up areas.The square of difference between these two multi-center indices is used as deviation index to study the impact of multi-center deviation degree on regional innovation efficiency.Main research findings are as follows.(1)From the results of the city scale characterized by nighttime light intensity,most of the provinces in China have a single-center spatial structure.Compared to the population of municipal districts and the land distribution of built-up areas,there is a trend from single center to multi centers.From the perspective of each region,the population and built-up areas of municipal districts in the eastern regions of China from 1994 to 2014 is increasingly scattered,presenting a typical multi-center spatial structure.As for the central and western regions,from 1994 to 2014,the distributions of urban population and built-up areas in most provinces have become increasingly concentrated.The central cities of provinces play a leading role,and thus present a single-centered spatial structure.Although Jiangxi province is in central China,it shows a multi-center spatial structure.(2)Based on the city scale represented by the population of the municipal district and the built-up areas,and the degree of multi-center measured by the order-scale law,the results of this study show that multi-centricity influences the regional innovation efficiency through the industrial diversification.And through four subsamples of East,Central,West,and Northeast,the variables are added and the time span is changed to test robustness,and basically consistent results are obtained.(3)The statistical demographic data at the city level may not truly reflect the size of the permanent population,and may cause errors in the measurement of the degree of multi-centricity.This paper uses the nighttime light intensity as an alternative measurement variable for the robustness test.The square of the difference between the multi-center index of economic activity distribution and the multi-center index of built-up land distribution is used as the multi-central degree deviation index.The empirical results of extended knowledge production function model show that,the more the urban economic activity distribution deviates from the multi-center degree of built-up areas,the lower the regional innovation efficiency is.Therefore,in the process of urbanization in China,attention should be paid to the coordination of population urbanization and land urbanization,and human capital of regions should be improved so that regional innovation efficiency can be promoted.In addition,the greater the deviation exists in the eastern regions of China,the smaller the innovation efficiency innovation is.Compared with the eastern part of the country,the negative impact of deviation on innovation efficiency is relatively small.