Evolution Of China's Regional Innovation Disparity

The 19th National People's Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that"innovation is the primary driving force for development.”Innovation plays a significant role in enhancng national and regional economic strength and comprehensive competitiveness.In fact,driven by a series of national and regional innovative development strategies,the level of regional innovation in China has been continuously improved.However,the regional innovation disparity has increasingly enlarged.The regional innovation disparity will further affect the regional economic inequality.Grasping the level of national and provincial innovation capability and its differences pattern,exploring the evolution of regional innovation differences and the corresponding factors,may provide the effective implementation of the national innovation and development strategies and the improvement of the level of national innovation with a theoretical reference.Therefore,the research on regional capabilities disparity and its convergence pattern during the period from 1998 to 2015 has a certain theoretical value and practical significance.The paper first sorts out relevant literature and establishes an index system evaluating the overall characteristics of national and provincial innovation capabilities,to conduct descriptive statistical analysis on national and provincial innovation input capabilities,innovation output capabilities,and innovation diffusion capabilities,and demonstrate regional innovation capability overall characteristics.Then,the Theil index model and its decomposition will be adopted to measure regional innovation capability inequality from multiple perspectives,to grasp the temporal and spatial characteristics of the regional innovation differences variation;Finally,a β convergence equations based on the KKP model,incorporated with innovation capital factor,innovation human input factor factor,and innovation cultural factor,will be constructed,to analyze the overall and regional characteristics of regional innovation capabilities convergence as long as the contribution of these three factors upon national and regional innovation capabilities convergence.The paper will offer corresponding policy recommendations based on the results of empirical research.The main conclusions of the paper are as follows:1.From the perspective of the overall characteristics of China's regional innovation capabilities,there exist significant regional inequalities in innovation input,innovation output,and innovation diffusion capacity.The phenomenon of two poles is obvious.The level of innovation input,innovation output,and innovation diffusion in the eastern region are far better than the other three regions,so are Guangdong province,Beijing,and Shanghai in eastern region,compared with other provinces and cities.2.From the perspective of the spatial-temporal evolution of regional innovation capability differences,during the period from 1998 to 2015,the national and regional innovation capabilities have continued to enlarge.There exists regional innovation capability disparity.Regional innovation capability differences have continued to narrow;besides,differences within the group are the main cause to the evolution of China's regional innovation capabilities differences.3.From the perspective of the convergence of regional innovation differences,from 1998 to 2015,the overall convergence of innovation differences doesn't exist.However,there exists a "club convergence" of regional innovation differences in the east,west,and northeast regions of China.In addition,the year 2007 is an inflection point in the shift of spatial pattern of China's regional innovation.Prior to 2007,there existed significant innovation ability inequalities between regions and the convergence rate of innovation differences is relatively slow;while after 2007,the regional innovation capacity maintains a relatively high level of growth,and convergence of innovation capabilities in both backward areas and developed areas is accelerating.