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Although the research funding policy has promoted the output and effect of research, whether it can identify innovative research topics and promote discipline development is worth investigating in depth. Taking Chinese humanities and social sciences (HSS) as an example, this study uses the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model to identify the topics of the HSS projects and papers funded by China's national research funds. The analysis reveals the effect of research funding policy on research topics in both topic selection and funding intensity: (1) the types of projects with strict restrictions on topics significantly guide the direction of research topics; (2) projects with less funding are more likely to result in emerging topic research; and (3) compared with social sciences and key universities, the funded projects of humanities and other institutions are more likely to focus on emerging topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese governments at all levels have been using various policies to encourage innovation by firms. However, few studies considered the superimposed effects of multilevel innovation policies. Based on the panel data of 443 Chinese innovation–oriented firms from 2008 to 2011, this study investigates the complementarities between national and local science and technology programmes. The heterogeneous effects across stages of the innovation process are also considered. Results show that the national science and technology (S&T) programmes significantly increase firms' external research and development (R&D) expenditure but inhibit the commercialisation. In addition, the national and local S&T programmes complement each other in promoting external R&D expenditure while presenting substitutive in increasing patent outputs. This paper further finds that national and local programmes are more likely to be complementary at high subsidy intensity. This study contributes to the development of policy mix theory and has manifold implications for designing pertinent innovation policy systems [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By adopting a set of panel data from thirty provinces in China from 2007 to 2017, this paper examines how regional innovation efficiency is influenced by different types of innovation policies from a specific long-range plan ('National Medium- and Long-Term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006–20)'). We incorporate public direct research and development (R&D) grants, R&D tax credits, and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection into our research. We also explore the heterogeneous influences of these factors at different stages in regional innovation development. The results indicate that public direct R&D grants have a significantly negative influence, especially in innovation-catching-up regions. Conversely, the R&D tax credit has a considerably positive impact on innovation-catching-up regions. IPR protection plays various roles according to different innovation development stages. Specifically, IPR protection has a positive impact on innovation-leading regions, while it negatively influences regional innovation efficiency in innovation-catching-up regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become an impactful science superpower, but it is asserted that its influence provides it with disproportionate benefits that some national research policies have not thus far appreciated. To create context, Web of Science data are used to analyse research collaborations between the UK and China: trends in volume of output between 1981 and 2019; citation impact; and comparative performance across research fields. UK–China collaboration increased from fewer than 100 co-authored papers before 1990, to 750 per year in 2000, 3,324 in 2010, and 16,267 papers (10.9 per cent of UK output) in 2019. UK–China collaboration is concentrated in technology-based fields: in some (e.g. telecommunication), over 30 per cent of UK papers are in collaboration with Chinese-based researchers. The paper discusses the policy consequences to the UK of this indicative dependency, arguing that exiting from such collaborations is ill advised, provided the risks, perceived or real, are mapped, managed, and mitigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on policy coordination between government agencies reveals little about how coordination is managed in centralized political systems. This paper, therefore, presents a dynamic and quantitative analysis of policy coordination in China based on the science and technology (S&T) policy documents issued by China's central government agencies in the period 1978–2019. From a series of snapshots depicting inter-agency policy development in five historical stages over this timeframe, we find that (1) policy coordination has developed steadily and has mainly occurred to interpret macro strategies and put in place more detailed implementation measures. (2) Ministries under the purview of the State Council have played a leading role in policy coordination, while other types of agencies have cooperated in more supporting roles. (3) Coordination efforts have mainly focused on inclusive and national demand-oriented themes, such as high-tech industrialization, rural S&T, and social development. This research offers a panoramic view of policy coordination trajectories and mechanisms in centralized political systems. As such, it adds to the analysis methods available for quantitatively studying policy documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an influential economic entity, China's economic growth pattern is changing. The traditional way brought high-speed growth as well as caused environmental damage. The concept of environmental innovation, which combines the advantage of technology innovation and environmental consideration, has become a vital means to achieve sustainable development. Due to the double externality characteristic of environmental innovation, the government plays an important role in its development. Based on provincial panel data from 2008 to 2017, this paper first examines the distinct influences of various economic incentive instruments on environmental innovation. Then, the moderation role of marketization is explored. The results show that governments' direct financial expenditure on environmental protection has a positive impact on environmental innovation, while the effect of the environmental tax is not significant. In addition, the impact is negatively moderated by marketization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answering how and why policies emerge and interact with one another will advance our understanding of the evolution of policies. The paper investigates policy emergence as a practice defining possible policy objects in a specific domain and policy interaction as a practice enabling the defined objects. To trace the policy evolution, we define three types of citations to describe policymaking processes, establish the citation and co-citation networks of policy documents, and then conduct a natural language processing-based bibliometric analysis. We reveal the patterns of policymaking practices and identify the focal policies in a given domain. The results within the context of Chinese innovation and entrepreneurial policies suggest the information contained in focal policies drives the direction of future policy themes, as well as regular policies, tend to cite focal policies and follow the ideas of focal policies to achieve their goals. Our findings also provide some implications for Chinese future policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]