Does Patent Portfolio Drive Global Value Chain Climbing?-Empirical Evidence From China

Under the new era of China's high-quality development, the innovation driving of enterprises is shifting from single patent competition to patent portfolio competition, which is of great significance for cultivating a more robust domestic market and realizing a higher level of opening-up. This paper puts the firms' patent portfolio index and domestic value-added ratio into a unified analysis framework. It explores the relationship between them by utilizing the Chinese Industrial Database, Chinese Financial Database and China Customs Database from 2000 to 2014. The empirical results suggest that: (1) Domestic patent portfolio plays a significant role in promoting enterprises' export domestic value-added ratio, the suitability of domestic invention and utility model patents is not high in China; (2) Based on the heterogeneity analysis, the domestic patent portfolio of public trading enterprises and high productivity enterprises has a more significant promotion effect on domestic value-added ratio. (3) By examining the mechanism, it shows that price-cost markup and the relative price of intermediate goods are significant intermediate variables of domestic patent portfolio promoting domestic value-added ratio, and patenting abroad is an essential channel of domestic invention patent promoting domestic value-added ratio. This paper made an in-depth analysis of the influence of domestic patent portfolio on domestic value-added ratio, which provides a policy reference value for optimizing the Chinese patent system and enhancing competitive export advantage.