The regional disparity of influencing factors of technological innovation in China: evidence from high-tech industry

Accurate analysis of technological innovation mechanism in different regions is the key to promoting China’s technological innovation, economic transformation and upgrading. This paper collected statistical data of high-tech enterprises in 27 provinces in China from 2009 to 2016, established a novel PSO-GRNN model, and applied sensitivity analysis to explore the influencing factors and regional differences of enterprise technological innovation in Eastern, Central and Western China. The empirical results showed that the influencing factors were innovation investment, market environment, government support and foreign technology spillover sorting by impact size. Innovation investment was the decisive factor of technological innovation, but innovation resources mainly concentrated on Eastern China, severely insufficient in Central and Western China. Market environment was favorable to Eastern and Central China, but unfavorable to Western China, which restricted greatly the development of Western China. The principalagent problem of state-owned enterprise and the crowding out effect of government research and development funds jointly led to the negative influence of government support on technological innovation. Foreign technology spillover had significant positive effects on technological innovation in Western China. This paper clarifies some disputes about influencing factors of technological innovation and provides a new research perspective for related issues. First published online 27 May 2021