In regional economics, factors including technological level, political systems, population distribution, and natural resource endowments within a region significantly influence its economic activities. As the "primary productive force", science and technology are intrinsically linked to urbanization, urban economic issues, spatial structures, regional productivity distribution, and resource development/utilization - technological advancement directly drives socio-economic growth.
As a crucial indicator for measuring technological innovation, patent data effectively quantifies innovation outputs. According to the National Intellectual Property Administration's December 2020 statistical report, China received 1.403 million invention patent applications and granted 470,000 invention patents from January to November 2020, representing a 40% year-on-year increase from 2019. This substantial patent volume demonstrates China's sustained development momentum in innovation. However, current industry practices for macro-level patent data analysis remain overly simplistic, predominantly using provinces and years as minimum statistical units, failing to conduct more granular statistical exploration.
Compared with micro-level enterprise patent data, CnOpenData's China Patent Regional Statistics provides macro-level evidence for regional innovation development. Based on 2020 administrative division codes, this dataset categorizes regions by province, city, and county/district, with monthly granularity, offering detailed statistics on both patent applications and grants nationwide.
Data Features
- Comprehensive coverage of China's regional patent statistics up to the latest year, encompassing both application and grant phases;
- Precise identification and differentiation of addresses for secondary patent applicants beyond primary applicants;
- Contains not only annual-level statistics but also monthly-level data to better accommodate academic research requiring monthly granularity;
- Provides statistics at provincial and city levels while extending to county/district levels to support finer-grained regional innovation studies.
Database Application Guide
Original: Optimization Guide for China's Regional Patent Statistics
Time Coverage
1985-2024
Field Display
Sample Data
Due to the large number of tables, this page only displays patent application sections.
Provincial Patent Application Table
City-level Patent Application Table
County/District Patent Application Table
Relevant Literature
- Josh L. and Amit S. 2021, "The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond", The Review of Financial Studies.
Data Update Frequency
Annual updates