Research On Threshold Characteristics And Spatial Effect Of Digital Economy On Regional Technological Innovation

In the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial change,China’s original investment-driven development model has led to a slowdown in economic growth,insufficient growth momentum,lack of synergy of innovation and other problems have gradually come to the fore,coupled with the face of Europe and the United States technology blockade,key technologies encountered by the card neck and other difficulties.In this context,the digital economy is increasingly becoming a new driving force to help China achieve core technology breakthroughs and become an innovative country in the world.On the one hand,the development of digital economy has reshaped the nature of innovation and accelerated the cross-regional flow of innovation factors.On the other hand,the over-expansion of the digital economy has also brought about digital hollowing out and the tendency to move away from the real to the imaginary,which inhibits the upgrading of regional technological innovation.Meanwhile,the digital economy has spatio-temporal characteristics,which will not only promote and accelerate the regional diffusion of innovation results through exemplary and spillover effects,but also weaken the enthusiasm of innovation subjects.Will the impact of digital economy on regional technological innovation be qualitatively changed by the quantitative change of digital economy development? Are there threshold characteristics and spatial effects of such impact? Therefore,it is important to investigate whether there are threshold characteristics and spatial effects of the digital economy on regional technological innovation,which is of great practical significance for China to "achieve a breakthrough in core technology and be among the world’s innovative countries".In this thesis,panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2020 were selected.Firstly,a threshold regression model was used to test whether there is a non-linear relationship between the digital economy and regional technological innovation,i.e.,whether there is a threshold characteristic of the impact of the digital economy on regional technological innovation.Then,the spatial autocorrelation of key variables was examined by the global Moran index and the local Moran index.Economic distance weights were constructed to measure the economic distance among provinces,and the spatial Durbin model was used to suggest the impact of digital economy and each dimension on regional technological innovation and spatial spillover effects.The hypotheses were revalidated by replacing the key variables and replacing the spatial weight matrix in the robustness test.In further analysis,this thesis not only explores the spillover effects of the digital economy on the dimensions of regional technological innovation,but also examines the regional heterogeneity of the spillover effects of the digital economy on regional technological innovation.It is found that there are significant threshold characteristics of the digital economy’s contribution to regional technological innovation.Specifically,the digital economy will promote the level of regional technological innovation,but the enhancement effect of the digital economy on regional technological innovation after crossing the threshold is lower than that before the threshold.Meanwhile,the impact of the digital economy on regional technological innovation has positive spatial spillover.From different dimensions of digital economy development,there is a positive spatial spillover of the impact of digital development environment and industrial digitization on regional technological innovation,while the spatial effect of digital industrialization on the impact of regional technological innovation is not seen to be significant.Heterogeneity tests show that the positive spatial spillover of the impact of the digital economy on regional imitative innovation is higher than that of substantive innovation.A significant positive spatial correlation between the digital economy on regional technological innovation exists in the central and western regions,while it does not hold in the eastern region.According to the above conclusions,this thesis puts forward the following four suggestions.First,the government should improve laws and regulations related to the digital economy,enhance supervision and build a benign market competition system.Second,the government should comprehensively promote the development of digital economy,consolidate the construction of digital infrastructure,and continuously accelerate the pace of digital industrialization and industrial digitization.Third,the government should formulate differentiated digital development strategies according to local conditions,narrow the "digital divide",and achieve coordinated development of regional innovation.Fourth,the government should improve policy incentives and intellectual property protection mechanisms to accelerate the transformation of innovation models.