Veneziano Araujo (p), Renato Garcia

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

This paper analyses the spatial patterns and spatial interdependencies of innovation and the role local determinants of innovation play in Brazilian micro-regions. Specifically, it evaluates how local firms’ R&D, regional academic research, agglomeration level and local industrial specialization or diversification affect regional innovation. In order to analyse these factors, an empirical model based on the Knowledge Production Function was estimated using a Spatial Panel with Brazilian patent data from 2004 to 2010. Preliminary results indicate that higher levels of regional industrial R&D imply greater innovation and that greater university research at a regional level positively impacts industrial innovation. Moreover, agglomerated and diverse regions present better innovative performance.

Amit Batabyal (p), Seung Yoo

Veneziano Araujo

We focus on a region that is creative in the sense of Richard Florida. The creative class is broadly composed of existing and candidate entrepreneurs. The general question we analyze concerns the effects of Schumpeterian competition between existing and candidate entrepreneurs on economic growth and innovation policy in this region. We perform four specific tasks. First, when the flow rate of innovation function for the existing entrepreneurs is strictly concave, we delineate the circumstances in which competition between existing and candidate entrepreneurs leads to a unique balanced growth path (BGP) equilibrium. Second, we examine whether it is possible for the BGP equilibrium to involve different levels of R&D expenditures by the existing entrepreneurs. Third, we show how the BGP equilibrium is altered when the flow rate of innovation function for the existing entrepreneurs is constant. Finally, we study the impact that taxes and subsidies on R&D by existing and candidate entrepreneurs have on R&D expenditures and regional economic growth.

Antonio Garcia-Sanchez (p)

Amit Batabyal

See extended abstract

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (p), Callum Wilkie , Min Zhang

Antonio Garcia-Sanchez

Innovation in China is highly territorialised. The lion’s share of the country’s innovative activity is concentrated in its more economically developed regions and cities. Underdeveloped environments in China are not wholly incapable of generating innovative output. How they manage to do so, however, is not sufficiently understood. This paper explores processes of innovation in China’s less developed cities. A comparative econometric analysis of 283 Chinese cities between 2003 and 2014 is employed to address two specific questions: (a) what are the socioeconomic and structural factors that govern processes of innovation in China’s more and less developed cities, respectively? And (b) how do these factors differ between the two types of cities? The analysis indicates that China’s more and less developed cities innovate in markedly different ways. Most generally, the innovation processes, and by extension, systems hosted by China’s more developed cities are more complex, integrated and mature than those that have emerged in the country’s less developed cities.