 Picking ‘winners' in China: Do subsidies matter for indigenous innovation and firm productivity?China Economic Review, 2017, vol. 44, issue C, 154-165 Abstract: This paper examines the effects of public subsidies across several dimensions of the innovation process and the implications for productivity. As an identification strategy, panel data is used to estimate a structural innovation model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity combined with matching techniques that help ensure comparability between subsidized and non-subsidized firms. The findings reveal that public subsidies reduce firms' economic performance in lower and higher technology industries despite promoting indigenous innovation in the higher technology industries. Policymakers may tolerate lower average efficiency if they expect that some of the state-backed firms will eventually become successful innovators that go on to generate significantly large social welfare payoffs. Although the findings do not support such an expectation, thus bringing into question whether the social payoff from China's so-called picking ‘winners' strategy justifies the cost. Keywords: Picking winners; State subsidies; R&D; Innovation; TFP; China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:44:y:2017:i:c:p:154-165 DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2017.04.005 Access Statistics for this article China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier |
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