اثر سیگنال دولتی سوبسید های تحقیق و توسعه در چین: آیا مالکیت مهم است؟  The signal effect of Government R&D Subsidies in China: Do ownership matter?

1. Introduction Government subsidies for R&D are intended to alleviate market failures in R&D activities, which may be caused by spillovers of ideas to competitors or a low appropriability rate (Kleer, 2010). In recent years Chinese government has paid more and more attention to scientific and technological activities and the expenditures on them continue to increase. According to “China Science and Technology Statistics Yearbook 2013”, intramural expenditure on R&D has increased from 154.0 to 1331.2 billion yuan (RMB) from 2003 to 2014, of which the government funds increased from 46.1 to 319.5 billion yuan. Why does the government increase R&D subsidy significantly? Can the subsidy policy affect the R&D activities of enterprises? Generally speaking, the R&D subsidies from government have positive effects to innovative enterprises’ activities, for example, alleviating their tendency to underinvestment in R&D activities (Meuleman and Maeseneire, 2012). However, another effect of R&D subsidies, the signal effect or certification effect has not attracted enough attention. The signal/certification effect means that the government can certify that the granted enterprises are valuable to investment to private financiers by subsidies, thus government grants may serve as a signal for nice investments to private investors (Meuleman and Maeseneire, 2012). In this paper, we examine this effect empirically, that is, whether government subsidies to R&D increase external R&D investments, improving enterprises’ access to external finance in general in Chinese context, and whether the effect is different in different ownership structure, such as state-owned and private enterprises. From the perspective of additionality, most of the literatures on R&D subsidies are primarily concerned with whether a government grant has positive effects on input (e.g., increase in R&D efforts) and/or output additionality (e.g., increase in growth/employment/number of patents). Our analysis evaluates another additionality effect, i.e. behavioural additionality, it means that obtaining a grant may induce changes in the enterprise’s behavior. From a systemic view on innovation processes, innovations are created within a complex web of interactions between different actors of the innovation system (Fischer, 2001). So more general, the behavioural additionality may also change the behavior of other actors towards the enterprises, for example, it may change the behavior of banks towards the enterprise (Meuleman and Maeseneire, 2012). The signal/certification effect, as a kind of behavioural additionality, means that government officials may certify firms worth investing by granting subsidies. Given the uncertainty, receiving a subsidy might act as an observable indicator of the unobservable applicant’s quality (Hauessler et al., 2012). Consequently, R&D subsidies weaken the information asymmetries, beneficial for external financing. As for ownership, actually, public firms are present in several industries such as banking and insurance, gasoline distribution, radio,television, automobile and steel, health-care and energy (Anderson et al., 1997). And there are a great many public firms in China, because of the special market situation of Chinese transition economy, stateowned and private enterprises have coexisted in the market for a long time, which is also known as the mixed market. Chinese economic transition from centralized to open makes it a particularly interesting context to examine the links between ownership and government R&D subsidies effects. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are directly controlled by the government, as the controlling owner of shares, will the government grand more R&D subsidies to SOEs than to private enterprises? Moreover, are there some differences about the signal/certification effect of government R&D subsidies between the state-owned and private enterprises?