The Impact Of Digital Regulation On Technological Innovation

Since the beginning of the 21 st century,with the rapid development and transformation of information and communication technologies,digital economy has become a new driving force for high-quality development in the digital era of all countries.However,compared with the speed of digital technology iteration,digital norms are often relatively lagging behind,and a series of new challenges have emerged in the process of social digital development both globally and in China.From a global perspective,countries around the world standardize and regulate digital elements through the implementation of digital regulatory policies.Digital regulatory policies are playing an increasingly important role in the national governance system.However,whether digital regulatory policies can achieve policy objectives has two completely different voices and has not been clearly answered.The existing researches mainly focus on the positive effects of digital economy,while the researches on the impact of digital regulation on technological innovation are relatively few.Is the emerging digital regulatory policy a helping hand or a robbing hand for innovation? Starting from this research perspective,this paper explores the impact of digital regulatory policies on technological innovation,which not only helps to answer the emerging digital regulatory issues,but also has important practical significance for China to continuously deepen digital development,standardize the behavior of digital enterprises,and balance data sharing and data protection.Firstly,through literature review,this paper summarizes the existing relevant research progress,and sorts out the historical context of global digital regulatory policies.Secondly,based on the digital policy database of European Center for International Political Economy,this paper calculates the digital policy regulation level of 41 countries from 1989 to 2017,and analyzes the evolution trend and national differences of digital regulatory policies from the perspective of characteristics.Finally,based on the traditional research paradigm of the relationship between government regulation and technology innovation,this paper makes a theoretical analysis of the influence of digital regulatory policies on technology innovation from the digital-driven perspective,and proposes the research hypothesis of this paper.Using data from 41 countries from 1989 to 2017,this paper explores the relationship between the level of digital policy regulation and national technological innovation.The empirical results show that:(1)digital regulatory policies have a significant positive effect on national technological innovation,and the baseline regression results are robust;(2)Digital regulatory policies play a stronger role in promoting innovation fields with high digital input intensity;(3)Relatively mature regulatory policies in the digital field have a stronger role in promoting technological innovation;(4)The marginal impact of digital regulatory policies on national technological innovation gradually decreases with the evolution of the development stage;(5)Digital regulatory policies in developed countries have a greater impact on national technological innovation;(6)Digital regulatory policies of countries with high economic volume have a greater impact on national technological innovation.Finally,the research conclusions of this paper provide reliable empirical evidence that digital regulation policy drives technological innovation,and provide relevant policy implications for China to promote the optimization and reform of digital regulation system and improve the regulatory framework of digital market.The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First,this paper explores the relationship between digital regulatory policies and technological innovation from the perspective of government regulation.Previous scholars mostly start from the positive effect of digital or the promotion role of digital industrial policies,while ignoring the role of regulatory policies in technological innovation.Second,the research data is more comprehensive.This paper is based on a more long-term measure of the level of digital regulation in 41 countries.Thirdly,on the basis of the overall shadow analysis,this paper also carries out the heterogeneity test of dividing innovation fields and regulatory policies respectively,which provides more support for the hypothesis demonstration in this paper.