关键词: 增长目标, 区域技术创新, 中央政府发展导向调整

Abstract:

Goal governance is a typical feature of Chinese government, which is particularly obvious in the economic field. Since the late 1980s, it hasbecome a universal practice forChinese governments at all levels toset clear economic growth targets every year to guide economic development. These kinds of targets have certain characteristics of hard constraints on government behavior, that is, the growth targets are often fulfilled. In the above context, the question that this paper is concerned about is whether the growth targets will inhibit regional innovation while promoting the rapid development of China’s economy. Meanwhile, the central government has reconsidered the national economic development model since the beginning of the 21st century, and has believed that China’s economic development model needs to be transformed from a quantitative expansion type to an innovation-driven type. Therefore, the second question to be examined in this paper is whether the adjustment of the central government’s development orientation will change the relationship between growth targets and the regional innovation.
To answer the above questions, this paper uses city-level data from 2003 to 2016 to make aquantitative analysis. The results show that the local growth targets significantly inhibits the regional innovation, indicating that the macro-economic management system of the growth target management is an important reason for the insufficient incentive of the regional innovation in China. The study also finds that the adjustment of central government’s development orientation has significantly weakened the negative impact of local growth targets on the regional innovation, and the sub-sample regression shows that the local growth targets has significantly inhibited the regional innovation before the adjustment, and significantly promoted the regional innovation after the adjustment. The mechanism analysis shows that the preference of the government financial science and technology expenditure is an important intermediary connecting the relationship between local growth targets and theregional innovation. The heterogeneity test analysis shows that the pressure of local growth targets and the length of officials’ tenure do not significantly affect the relationship between local growth targets and the regional innovation, but the positive effect of the central government’s development orientation adjustment is obvious in places where the local growth targets are lower and the official tenure is long. Compared with the central and western regions, the local growth targets in the eastern regions have a greater inhibitory effect on the regional innovation, and the central government’s development orientation adjustment has failed to effectively alleviate the tension between local growth targets and the regional innovation.
The inhibitory effect of local growth target on the regional innovation does not change significantly due to the pressure of local growth targets, which shows that the negative impact of maintaining growth on the regional innovation is universal. The role of the central government’s development-oriented adjustment is limited when local governments face higher targets, indicating that the barriers to the transformation of economic growth drivers faced by China will not be eliminated automatically as the central government adjusts its expectations. Therefore, it is very important to set scientific economic growth targets for China to achieve innovation-driven development strategy.

Key words: Growth Target, Regional Innovation, Central Government’s Development-oriented Adjustment