公共政策对企业创新支持的绩效——基于直接补贴与税收优惠的比较分析

政府公共政策是否促进了企业创新？公共政策和技术创新的研究领域一直不乏“促进论”和“抑制论”的争论。现有文献还缺乏系统研究对此进行甄别。本文认为，政府直接补贴和税收优惠对不同所有制类型企业的创新活动激励具有差异性，从而无法简单归入“促进论”或“抑制论”。本文以全国第一次经济普查的26326家规模以上内资企业、2970家港澳台投资企业以及3625家外资企业分析对象，通过地区层面和行业层面的实证分析得出了以下结论：（1）政府对内资企业研发活动的直接补贴政策显著提高了内资企业的研发强度。这支持了“促进论”的观点；（2）税收优惠政策对港澳台投资企业的创新活动增加有着较强的促进作用，这是“促进论”中成本效应发挥的重要结果；（3）港澳台和外商投资企业的研发强度与政府直接补贴呈现出显著的负相关关系，这意味着“抑制论”中挤出效应的作用机制使政府直接补贴对企业创新活动了负面作用。本文的政策含义是政府在实施促进企业自主创新活动的各项公共政策中，应该以对内外资企业都统一的公平的税收优惠为主而减少直接补贴的使用；在利用直接补贴对企业研发提供支持时，应以对内资企业补贴为主，减少港澳台和外资企业的直接补贴。

Do public policies support firm’s innovation? A comparative analysis on the subsidies and tax credit

Do public policies support firm’s innovation? The debate between promotion theory and inhibition theory has not been stopped in the research field of public policy and technological innovation. The existing literature is also lack of systematic study. How different public policies, namely subsidies and tax credit, affect enterprises’ R&D activities at both the regional and secttional level, is empirically investigated using data from 2004 National Economic Census in China, the data involve 2,6326 domestic funded industrial enterprises above a designated size, 2,970 industrial enterprises with the investment from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and 3,625 industrial enterprises funded by foreign capital. The results show that direct subsidies for firms’ R&D activities do contribute to the intensity of R&D expenditure in domestic firms, while direct subsidies have a negative impact on R&D activities among the foreign-funded firms. And the results also demonstrate that the tax credit stimulates R&D activities for those enterprises invested by Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, whereas it has not an evident impact on R&D activities for domestic firms. On the basis of these empirical findings, it is concluded that different public policies have differential effects on enterprises’ R&D activities for different types of ownership, so they have ambiguous effects, which neither support the viewpoint of stimulation nor compression exclusively. So the findings will not only be conducive to the debate of the two different academic viewpoints, but also help to distinguish the role played by different public policies in practice.