State Capacity and Innovation Policy Performance: A Comparative Study on Two Types of Innovation Projects in China

This study analyzes state capacity by comparing two types of innovation policies in China and estimating its impacts on policy performance. State capacity is defined as the extent to which the state can realize its objectives in policy and it is determined by government professionalism and penetration into industrial activities. Due to both the lack of channels to grasp information regarding complicated innovation processes and professional personnel capable of understanding such information, the state capacity demonstrated in these policies is low. The government relies more on indicators of innovation quantity rather than those of innovation quality as criteria for identifying innovation. This leads to poor policy performances in which grantees tend to meet only the qualitative requirements of the policies, namely increasing the number of patents, rather than engaging in genuine innovation and pursuing the essential objective of the policies. Therefore, even with market‐oriented reform, transitional economies like China still need to strengthen state building for achieving policy objectives. 本文通过比较中国两种类型的创新政策及其绩效来研究国家能力。本文把国家能力定义为国家能够实现政策目标的程度，它取决于政府专业性及其对工业活动的渗透性。中国政府既缺乏获取复杂创新过程方面信息的渠道，又缺乏能够理解这些信息的专业人员，所以其在两种创新政策项目中的国家能力很弱。中国政府更多地把创新数量指标而非质量指标作为识别创新的标准。这造成了政策绩效不佳：受资助者更有可能仅仅满足政策所要求的数量指标，而不是进行真正的创新活动，追求政策的实质性目标。因此，即使在市场化改革之后，像中国这样的转型经济体为了实现政策目标，仍然需要加强国家能力建设。