Spatial spillovers and convergence in regional innovative activities

It is found that innovative outputs in China are highly clustered in two groups of provinces: one is the economically fast growing coastal provinces and other is inland provinces. Advance in spatial autocorrelation and regression analysis provide methods to assess the influence of the knowledge spillovers on the geographical distribution and growth of innovation. In this paper, we investigate interprovince inequality and convergence in per capita innovation outputs in China in the period 1985-2004. Our regression results show that there exist,0 convergence before 1996 and 6 divergence in the latter 10 years. The findings suggest the spatial spillovers effects influence convergence rates.