Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore employment differences over time across China’s hi-tech zones. Using data from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, we find that if a university science park is within a hi-tech zone, employment in that zone is higher, but that finding only holds for zones established in the pre-information communication technology period. After 2000, proximity to a university science park does not appear to be necessary for the exchange of tacit knowledge which we contend leverages the technology base of firms and organizations in the zone and thus their level of employment. We also find greater employment in hi-tech zones in which information technology is a dominant industry.
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Notes
One example was China’s development of a clean-technology industry (Campbell 2013). Due to concerns of dependence on foreign oil and heavy environmental pollution in China, the Chinese government has been investing in energy technology projects, especially renewable energy and energy storage technology. China is now a leading country in solar cell industry.
In China, science parks are linked with one or more universities, and they are usually located in or close to a university. The hi-tech zones discussed in this paper are different from university science parks. Hi-tech zones are larger than university science parks and might include one or more university parks in the zone.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Technology Transfer Society annual conference at George Mason University. We thank Cristiano Antonelli and Nick Vonortas for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Any park founded in 2015 is thus coded as having an age of 1 year.
Link and Yang (2017) investigated a distance variable in their analysis of the employment growth among Korean technoparks, but they found no statistical relationship between distance and employment using a model similar to that in equation (1) above.
Hobbs et al. (2017b, p. 503) wrote: “… the ICT revolution mitigated aspects of the need for scientists to have face-to-face interactions with university scientists and [it] increased park productivity more generally …”
These results are available from the authors on request.
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Chen, C., Link, A.N. Employment in China’s hi-tech zones. Int Entrep Manag J 14, 697–703 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-017-0486-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-017-0486-z