下游竞争与上游企业创新:理论与中国证据

Downstream Competition and Upstream Innovation:Theory and Evidence from China

立足于纵向产业链视角,本文系统考察下游竞争如何影响上游企业的创新绩效。理论框架表明,给定创新活动能够降低上游企业的单位产品生产成本,下游竞争引致的中间品需求规模增加将提升上游企业创新活动的边际收益,由此形成创新激励效应。随后,本文借助中国加入WTO这一准自然实验,结合分行业进口关税下降幅度和投入产出表对工业行业的下游竞争冲击程度进行测算,进而利用双重差分方法进行因果识别。基于中国工业企业数据库及其配套专利数据库的计量结果显示,下游竞争显著提升了上游企业的创新绩效,而且该效应在行业竞争小、前期研发基础强和融资约束弱的上游企业更为凸显。进一步,下游部门的企业数量、行业竞争程度和中间品消耗量显著增加,证实了进口关税下降通过激发市场活力强化了下游竞争并扩大了上游企业的产品市场规模。本文强调,进口关税下降引致的下游竞争会通过纵向产业链激励上游企业创新,这不仅证实了对外开放有助于强化中国超大规模经济体的优势,而且为营造公平市场竞争环境以建设创新型国家提供了有益参考。

Faced with the latest technology revolution and increasingly fierce macro competition,the Report to the 2o"h National Congress of the Communist Party of China points out that"We must regard innovation as our primary driver of growth",Given that market competition helps improve economic efficiency through the selection and resource allocation channels,it is of great significance to build a unified,open,and orderly market system to realize innovation-driven growth.In order to prick administrative and market monopolies and promote the implementation of fair competition policies,China enacted the Anti-Monopoly Law in 2008 and issued the Opinion on Strengthening Anti-Monopoly and Deepening the Implementation of Fair Competition Policies in 2021,showing a strong determination to shape a fair competition market environment.Existing literature on the nexus between market competition and corporate innovation has provided many useful references,but little attention is paid to the innovation"spillover"effect of market competition.In particular,there is scant evidence on the innovation performance of upstream and downstream industries through vertical industry chains.Therefore,in-depth exploration of how market competition affects corporate innovation through industrial chain networks not only helps understand the practical significance of shaping a fair competition market environment,but provides useful reference for building a country of innovators.From the view of vertical industrial chain,this paper examines how downstream competition affects upstream firms'innovation output.In theory,given that innovation helps reduce the cost of each product,increasing demand for intermediate products caused by downstream competition increases the marginal revenue of upstream firms'innovation,thus incentivizing innovation.To verify the above theoretical inference,we constructed a simplified framework combining the input-output network structure and the Cournot game model to capture the internal logic of downstream competition motivating upstream firms to innovate.Further,we utilized China's accession to the WTO in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causality.Specifically,we calculated downstream competition based on import tariff reduction and input-output table,and then ran a difference-indifferences regression.Using the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises and the database provided by the State Intellectual Property Office,we found that downstream competition has a significantly positive impact on upstream firms'innovation,and this effect is more pronounced in firms with less industry competition,greater initial innovation capacity and weaker financial constraints.Moreover,the number of firms,the degree of industry competition and the scale of intermediate products in the downstream sector increase,consistent with the market size channel.Our study contributes to the existing literature in three aspects.First,from the perspective of vertical industrial chain,we systematically investigated how downstream competition affected upstream enterprises'innovation.Previous studies have examined the impacts of competition on corporate innovation within the industry,while neglecting the competitive transmission effect through vertical industrial chain.At the same time,numerous recent studies have emphasized that policy shocks can affect the macro economy through the inputoutput network structure,but few have examined the innovation"spillover"effect of market competition between upstream and downstream sectors.To fll this gap,we linked the two aforementioned literature and confirmed that downstream competition motivates upstream enterprises to innovate through the market scale effect.Second,we provide new evidence for the growth effect of trade liberalization.Existing literature have explored the significant impacts of trade liberalization and upstream monopolies on downstream enterprises'export decisions and product quality,but paid lile attention to how market competition caused by trade liberalization affected corporate innovation in upstream sectors.In this study,we incorporated the input-output network structure into the theoretical framework of corporate innovation decision-making to demonstrate how market competition caused by the decrease in import tariffs in downstream sectors incentivized upstream enterprises'innovation output,and provided empirical evidence for the causal relationship between them using China's accession to the WTO in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment.Third,our findings have important policy implications.We emphasize that the innovation effect of downstream competition can motivate upstream enterprises through vertical industrial chain,which not only reflects the importance of creating a fair market competition environment forbuilding a country of innovators,but provides useful reference for the main goal of the 14 t Five Year Plan period(2021-2025)that aims to strengthen the basic position of and improve the framework of competition policy.Furthermore,we justify that the market scale effect motivates upstream enterprises to innovate through downstream competition,which provides strong support for"giving priority to domestic circulation,and working to build a strong domestic market and turn China into a trader of quality".