Sustainable Innovation Governance: An Analysis of Regional Innovation with a Super Efficiency Slack-Based Measure Model

Kai Xu, Lawrence Loh and Qiang Chen
Additional contact information
Kai Xu: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Lawrence Loh: Centre for Governance, Institutions and Organisations, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, 1 Business Link, Singapore 117592, Singapore
Qiang Chen: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-19

Abstract: As China is undergoing economic transformation and facing increasing energy and environmental problems, it is essential to pay special attention to sustainable innovation governance. This research took industrial waste and total energy consumption into consideration and uses a super efficiency slack-based measure (SBM) model to empirically evaluate the regional innovation efficiency of Chinese provinces. The results showed that the efficiency of China’s regional sustainable innovation has not changed significantly over recent years. In addition, the results also showed large and varying degrees of innovation efficiency across different provinces. Eastern China, in comparison to central and western China, showed higher innovation efficiency. In addition, we found a slightly increasing trend in terms of innovation efficiency disparities between the three areas. On the basis of these findings, the reasons for the innovation efficiency gap between different regions were analyzed. The impacts of influential factors on sustainable innovation efficiency were further explored. We found that technology market maturity affected sustainable innovation efficiency positively, while government funding had a negative impact on sustainable innovation efficiency. Industrial structure and environmental regulations had no significant effect on sustainable innovation efficiency. Finally, some implications for improving governance performance in terms of sustainable innovation were provided.

Keywords: sustainable innovation governance; regional innovation; super efficiency slack-based measure model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/3008/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/3008/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:3008-:d:343261

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().