Place-based policy and innovation output at intra-city scale: an analysis of 35 mainland Chinese cities

Keywords: innovation, urban geography, place-based policies, China
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Knowledge and innovation are receiving increasing academic attention in recent years. Many cities worldwide have adopted place-based policies to promote the knowledge economy, while in the Chinese context, development zones and university towns are important implementations to shape the production of innovation. However, there is a lack of systematic review and sufficient evaluation of the performance of such policies. In this study, we fill this gap by creating two fine-scale and unique datasets of innovation output (patents and published papers) of 35 Chinese cities. Then a spatial analysis is performed to identify the clusters of innovation outputs inside cities and to assess whether such clusters correspond to existing place-based policies.