(1.School of Finance, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang Guizhou;2.Teacher Development and Teaching Technology Center, Guangdong University of Finance and Economics, Guangzhou Guangdong;3.School of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou Guangdong)
Abstract：This paper examines the influence of financial development on regional innovation by applying the panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 through 2016. An in-depth study is made of the said influence by constructing a Spatial Dubin Model (SDM) to clarify the spatial interaction between financial development and regional technological innovation activities, and considering the issue from the three perspectives of time series, regional sections as well as patent levels. The results show that the effects of financial development in terms of technological innovation output are significantly heterogeneous. More specifically, in the early stages of development of the eastern and central regions, the initial goal of financial development was not to promote technological innovation. However, with the economic growth and transformation in those regions advancing, the financial development therein was later turned into a driving force for the technological innovation efforts in the regions. On the other hand, the western region, unfortunately, fails to facilitate the high-end technological innovation activities, for the weak background in technological innovation and the poor strength in financial development in the region.From the perspective of spatial correlation, it can be seen that the innovation output likely to be induced by the financial development in the surrounding areas is very much limited, for the characteristics of technological innovation activities. There even exists a certain degree of absorption of the local technological innovation resources, which is certainly not conducive to the advancement of technological innovation activities in the region.The presence of all the phenomena reveals that there is much room for work towards the optimization in the current competitive financial development, as this paper concludes. The findings of the study are expected to be of help to an informed decision on a more rational allocation of the regional financial resources, hence improving the technological innovation momentum in the region.
Key words: financial development, technological innovation, spatial effects, Spatial Dubin Model