鼓励关键设备进口的创新效应——兼议中国企业的创新路径选择

Abstract

Encouraging key equipment imports has been implemented as one of innovation policies in China for a few years, yet scholars have paid little attention to this issue. By using the product-level policy shock caused by dynamic adjustments of the 'Catalogs of Technologies and Products Encouraged to Import', we systematically explore the broad impact of encouraging key equipment imports on corporate innovation. By using the micro-firm data from 2002 to 2016, we find that the encouragement policies on imports significantly increase the number and the quality (e.g., grants, citations, or market value) of patent applications by stimulating imports and enhancing credit capacities. The innovative impact of the incentive policies is not limited to the imported key equipment but can spillover to other products within the firm. However, with the competition and substitution effects of imports as well as the knowledge spillover to downstream innovation, the encouragement policies significantly reduce basic innovation conducted by firms. The large number of key equipment promotes the value of application innovation and weakens the status of basic innovation. Furthermore, the effect of the encouragement policies on corporate innovation is much more pronounced in state-owned enterprises than private firms. The enlightenment of this paper is that we should not only highlight the important role of key equipment imports in catalyzing firms' applied research and commercialization, but strengthen the incentives to conduct basic innovation and be cautious about the biased implementation of the encouragement policies to prevent it from weakening firms' abilities in basic innovation and hindering their self-growth.