DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18434236
title: Regional technological innovation and the unified national market Evidence from China's national standardization comprehensive reform pilot

description: Regional_Technological_Innovation: Drawing on existing research regarding the weighting design of regional technological innovation indicators, this paper constructs an assessment framework for regional technological innovation from three dimensions: input, performance, and transformation (Li & Zhu, 2021).

Economic development: Measured by the log of regional GDP per capita; 

Human capital: Average years of schooling; 

Financial development: Proxied by the share of regional financial institutions' year-end loan balance in local GDP; 

Openness: Calculated as the proportion of a region's total trade volume relative to its GDP; 

Government financial support: Measured as the share of government S&T spending in regional GDP.

Standardization_Project: If region i has not implemented the pilot in year t, then  =0; if region has begun implementing the pilot in year t, then  =1.

slope: the regional average geographic slope

group: 1 indicates pilot regions; 0 indicates non-pilot regions.

UI_Collaboration: It is proxied by the proportion of internal R&D expenditure in universities funded by enterprises

UI_Collaboration2: Patents jointly filed by listed firms and universities are considered as outcomes of university-industry collaboration. A dummy variable for collaboration is constructed, set to 1 if a listed company has such collaborative outcomes, and 0 otherwise. Finally, the number of participating enterprises is aggregated to derive a regional indicator for university-industry collaboration.

Intellectual_Property_Protection : For judicial protection, the number of concluded intellectual property cases proxies for intellectual property protection, and it is deflated by GDP to remove scale effects

Intellectual_Property_Protection2: Administrative protection is measured as (1 – the rate of patent dispute incidence), where this rate is calculated by dividing the count of accepted patent infringement cases by the count of patents granted in the region.

Market_Competition: The ratio of non-state enterprise employment to total regional employment

Market_Competition2: China’s marketization index compiled by the National Economic Research Institute for a robustness check

Unified_Market_Index: Parsley & Wei (1996) based on the iceberg cost theory proposed the relative price method for measuring the degree of market segmentation. This approach measures regional market segmentation using the variance in relative prices of traded goods, offering a reliable proxy for market integration. The relative price variance of traded goods across regions is subjected to reciprocal and logarithmic transformations to ultimately derive the unified national market index.

Green_Loan_Policy: the national big data comprehensive experimental zone policy, 1 indicates pilot regions; 0 indicates non-pilot regions.

Big_Data_Policy: the national big data comprehensive experimental zone policy, 1 indicates pilot regions; 0 indicates non-pilot regions.

NTTC_Policy: the national technology transfer regional center policy, 1 indicates pilot regions; 0 indicates non-pilot regions.

Innovative_City: the national innovative city pilot policy, 1 indicates pilot regions; 0 indicates non-pilot regions.