›› 2015, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (12): 171-179.

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Observations on the Correlation between State-owned Enterprises' Scale and Innovation Intensity

Zou Guoping, Liu Hongde, Wang Guangyi   

  1. School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001
  • Received:2015-05-15 Online:2015-12-30 Published:2015-12-25

Abstract:

In China, most of the state-owned enterprises bear heavily on national economy and security, and they are supposed to innovate independently and play a key role in the national innovation initiative. This paper extracts data from the listed companies and subsidiaries of centrally administered SOEs in 2013 and overcomes the limitation of ordinary least squares method. We use quantile regression model and different enterprise scale indicators to study the correlation between state-owned enterprises' scale and innovation intensity. We aim to provide theoretical support for exploring innovation pattern of state-owned enterprises and enhancing China's independent innovation capacity and innovation efficiency. Our empirical results have the following implications:(1) There is no inevitable links between innovation intensity and total assets; (2) A negative correlation is found between the staff size and innovation intensity among every quantile; (3) There is a positive correlation in low quantiles but a negative correlation in middle and high-quantiles between gross sales and innovation intensity. Therefore, we conclude that there is a negative link between innovation intensity and enterprises' scale of the listed companies and subsidiaries of centrally administered SOEs. The expansion of business scale has a 'crowding out' effect on R&D investment, especially in high-tech enterprises. Enterprise innovation intensity can be enhanced by controlling the state-owned enterprises at a reasonable level and keeping enterprise size in line with R&D needs.

Key words: innovation intensity, enterprise scale, state-owned enterprises, quantile regression