财政分权影响区域创新效率的两阶段中介效应研究

在经济高质量发展、建设创新型国家的发展战略背景下，地方政府或出于晋升竞标赛的需要，或出于对创新发展的内生需求，都积极动用有形之手推动创新发展。但财政分权体制下，具有不同财政支出偏好的地方政府，其财政支出结构和支出效率各有千秋。本文基于2011-2019年中国30个省市的面板数据，采用Tobit方法，从创新价值链角度入手，以地方政府财政支出结构和财政支出效率为中介变量构建计量模型，实证检验了财政分权对两阶段区域创新效率的影响机制与途径。研究结果表明：财政分权对于成果转化阶段的区域创新效率存在显著的负向直接效应，但对科技研发阶段的区域创新效率影响不显著；政府财政支出结构所起到的间接效应在一定程度上掩盖了财政分权对区域创新效率的抑制作用，且在科技研发阶段的遮掩效应较大；财政分权会降低地方政府的财政支出效率，从而对双阶段区域创新效率均产生抑制作用。

The two-stage mediating effect of fiscal decentralization on regional innovation efficiency

In the context of the development strategy of high-quality economic development and the construction of an innovative country, local governments actively use tangible hands to promote innovative development, either out of the need of promotion competition or out of the endogenous demand for innovative development. However, under the fiscal decentralization system, local governments with different fiscal expenditure preferences have different fiscal expenditure structures and expenditure efficiencies. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces and cities in China from 2011 to 2019, this paper adopts Tobit method to construct an econometric model from the perspective of innovation value chain and takes the fiscal expenditure structure and efficiency of local governments as intermediate variables to empirically test the influence mechanism and approach of fiscal decentralization on the two-stage regional innovation efficiency. The results show that fiscal decentralization has a significant negative direct effect on the regional innovation efficiency in the achievement transformation stage, but has no significant effect on the regional innovation efficiency in the r&d stage. The indirect effect of government expenditure structure covers up the restraining effect of fiscal decentralization on regional innovation efficiency to a certain extent, and the hiding effect is great in the stage of r&d. Fiscal decentralization will reduce the fiscal expenditure efficiency of local governments, which will inhibit the two-stage regional innovation efficiency.