Fukunari Kimura: Petti, Rubini, and Podetti tackle an important issue on the firm-level relationship of R&D activities, innovation capacity, and innovation-support policies with the corporate performance. China has recently been keen to promote R&D activities, which has reached over 2 percent of the GDP, a degree unusual among developing countries. We certainly would like to know whether such efforts at the level of the government and individual firms improve corporate performance or not. This is a trial to measure a sort of “R&D productivity” at the firm level as well as evaluating the effectiveness of R&D-support policies.
The paper uses China's firm-level data set that is constructed by matching multiple statistical sources. The sample set is a bit small: 405 private (mostly) small and medium manufacturing enterprises in the fields of new materials, bio, clean and renewable energies, and aerospace. Unfortunately, the data set is only for 2009, thus a...