金融发展如何影响区域创新质量?——来自中国对外贸易的解释

How Does Financial Development Affect the Quality of Regional Innovation?——Evidence from China’s Foreign Trade

不同于以往文献使用专利数量或者研发经费投入来度量创新,本文使用包含专利价值的创新指数来反映区域创新质量。基于2001-2016年中国30个省级行政区域的面板数据,从金融发展的规模、深化和效率三个层面,使用固定效应和两阶段最小二乘方法,实证检验了金融发展对区域创新质量的影响以及贸易开放在其中的机制作用。研究发现,金融规模、金融深化和金融效率对区域创新质量具有稳健的正向提升作用;金融规模、金融深化和金融效率可以通过贸易开放来提升区域创新质量,这一机制在进口贸易和出口贸易中均显著成立。进一步将对外贸易部门企业区分为外资企业和内资企业,发现金融发展提升区域创新质量的贸易开放渠道效应在内外资企业均存在,但金融发展主要是通过推动内资企业贸易开放来提升区域创新质量。以上研究结果为金融发展和区域创新质量提供了来自国际贸易的新解释和中国情境的新证据。

Different from previous literature using patents or R&D expenditures to measure innovation, this paper uses an innovation index that includes patent value to reflect the quality of regional innovation. Based on the panel data of 30 province-level administrative regions in China from 2001 to 2016, this paper empirically examines the impact of financial development on regional innovation quality and the mechanism role of trade openness in the framework of fixed effect and twostage least squares econometric unification from three aspects namely scale, depth and efficiency. The study finds that financial scale, financial deepening and financial efficiency have positive effects on regional innovation quality;financial scale, financial deepening and financial efficiency can enhance regional innovation quality through trade openness and this mechanism is evidently established in both import and export trade. Further, the foreign trade sector enterprises are divided into foreign-funded enterprises and domestic-funded enterprises. It is found that the channel effect of trade openness that financial development improves the quality of regional innovation exists in both domestic and foreign enterprises, but the financial development mainly improves the quality of regional innovation by promoting trade openness of domestic enterprises. The above findings provide new interpretations of international trade and new evidence from Chinese contexts for financial development and regional innovation quality.