Has Catch-up Strategy of Innovation Inhibited the Quality of China's Patents?
China has been the country with largest number of patent applications and licenses around the globe, accompanying with explosive growth by two digits in the past more than 10 years. The number of patents in China has increased by double figures in the past more than 10 years. However, China has been a big country in term of patent quantity, but not a strong country in term of patent quality, and even a country in the forefront of the world in term of independent innovation capability. Is it the signal of the promotion of patent quality and the capability of independent innovation that the explosive growth of patent in China? Are there patent bubble and patent illusion in China? This has aroused widespread concerns and doubts from the media and researchers at home and abroad. Meanwhile, this is also a major practical problem that must be explored and answered before China's policy makers and scholars. What needs to be highly concerned is, behind the explosive growth of China's patent number, besides the promotion factors of the increase of firms' independent innovation ability, it also conceals a series of government policies with Chinese characteristics. Do those policies result in the reduction of China's patent quality, and cause the occurrence of patent bubble and patent illusion? More importantly, from the current status of China, in order to carry out the national innovation driven development strategy, promote the independent innovation ability, from central to local governments at all levels of China, implement innovation pursuit strategy aimed at encouraging patent growth at different degrees. All of those strategies can be concentrated on various of financial support policies with government funds by different levels of governments especially provincial government, in response to the innovation pursuit strategy and patent promotion plan established by central government, for patent applications and grants by local firms and natural persons. And the research questions induced by those polices are, what kind of potential effects of various government fund support policies aimed at encouraging patent application and grant by different levels of governments? Do those policies show significant inhibit effect on the promotion of patent quality of China's firms? The explorations and answers to those questions, are not only closely related to the validity and direction of the China's innovation driven development strategy, but also closely related to China's fundamental goal of achieving sustainable economic growth in the context of"new normal". On the foundation of the reference, improvement, and expansion of existing literature on the design of econometric model, the measurement of patent quality at firm level and the definition of patent subsidy and promotion policies at provincial level. We have those core findings: from the perspective of patent application, the various categories and stages of patent subsidy, support and award polices at provincial level, have significantly negative effect and inhibit effect on firms' patent quality. From the perspective of patent grant, the various categories and stages of patent subsidy, support and award polices at provincial level, have no significant inhibit effect or promotion effect, but a certain degree of neutral effect on patent quality. In addition, either using OLS or FE estimation approaches and Heckman two-stage estimation strategy for the correction of sample selection bias, either using knowledge width approach or text interpretation approach to measure the patent quality of China's firms, all those robust checks support the main findings in this paper, and then verify a certain degree of negative effect caused by China's provincial level government's patent subsidy policy on the quality of patent application, and also confirm the effective supervision function of the Chinese government as a"gatekeeper"of patent quality.
Catch-up Strategy of InnovationGovernment Patent Subsidy PolicyQuality of PatentInhibitory EffectNeutral Effect
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
