The Determinants of Regional Innovation Capability——Comment on the Regional Gap of Innovation Capability in China

Based on the framework and model of national innovation capability created by Furman et al.(2002),this paper makes an empirical study on regional innovation capability in China using panel data at 30 provincial levels from 1998 to 2007.The results demonstrate that,regional innovation capability is determined by both the scale of input and productivity of input;and the former correlates with regional economic scale,knowledge stock and RD activities;while the latter depends heavily on regional nuanced factors including industrial cluster,the quality of linkage among industry-academic-research,and the capability of outside knowledge spillovers absorption.When further exploring the technological gap among regions in China,we find that there exist evident technological gaps among regions;in terms of the impact on total factor productivity(TFP),output of high-tech products and regional economic growth,technological gap will lead to further economic gap among regions.