1. 西安交通大学经济与金融学院, 陕西 西安 710061; 2. 美国布兰戴斯大学经济系, Waltham MA 02453
China's Technology Catch-up in the Perspective of Patenting
Jiang Renai1, Jin Zhenan1, Gary H.Jefferson2
1. School of Economics and Finance, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710061, China; 2. Department of Economics, Brandeis University, Waltham 02453, USA
Abstract：Comparing with the productivity measure, patenting can better evaluate a country's technology frontier.With more than 6 million patent records from USPTO, this paper formulates a composite quality-quantity measure of patenting, i.e., total forward citations which is used to evaluate the extent of China's overall technology catch-up with respect to seven economies, as well as China's relative position in relation to certain key technologies.Several results stand out.First, overall, China has registered a dramatic surge in USPTO-granted patents from 2005 to 2017.By 2017, China surpassed the U.K., France and China's Taiwan in total patent count, while substantially narrowing the count with S.Korea and Germany to less than half.However, the decline in China's 3-year forward citations count per patent has substantially impaired China's ability to translate its patent surge into technology frontier catch-up.Second, in certain key technologies including ICT, semi-conductors and optics, China's patent count has grown to exceed those of China's Taiwan, Germany, the U.K.and France, China's uniformly low cumulative forward citation counts reverses its quantity gains thereby impairing China's ability to narrow its gap in key technologies.The paper conducts the robustness test to discuss the possible adjustments of the ranking of economies' technological capacity by using WIPO/PCT data.
蒋仁爱, 金哲楠, GaryH.Jefferson. 基于专利视角的中国技术前沿追赶研究[J]. 中国科技论坛, 2020(8): 24-32.
Jiang Renai, Jin Zhenan, Gary H.Jefferson. China's Technology Catch-up in the Perspective of Patenting. , 2020(8): 24-32.
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