| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 經濟學系 === 101 === Taiwan's economic growth is highly dependent on its international trade. Due to the enormous changes in the industrial environment—such as those in relation to environmental protection, increasing land and labour costs, and a violent fluctuation in Taiwan’s local currency—that emerged as major issues from the late 1980s, many labour-intensive firms began to move their production lines overseas. However, FDI (foreign direct investment) has given rise to serious concerns as to whether technological knowledge outflows to overseas along with FDI are eroding Taiwan’s technological advantages. Therefore, the following three essays are presented to examine the Taiwan’s competitive advantages.
In the first essay, we consider that outward investment induce more domestic innovation or simply move local innovative efforts to foreign plants. This question is topical and relevant to Taiwan in view of its large share of outward investment concentrated in China and the special political relationship between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of outward investment in China on domestic innovative activity in Taiwan. Overall, this study finds that a positive relationship exists between outward investment and innovation in terms of R&;D intensity and patents, implying that investing in China is part of a global resource allocation strategy of Taiwanese multinational enterprises to allocate production in China and pay more attention to innovative activity in their domestic plants. Moreover, the deregulation of the policy regarding investing in China in 2001 has induced an upsurge in investment in China, although it does not seem to have brought about an outflow of technologies.
In the second essay, we investigate the determinants of firms’ innovation for 2004-2006. Based on the Second Industrial Innovation Survey in Taiwan Area, the essay aims to analyze the effect of the formal and informal protection on innovative activity, and whether strength protection enhances the firms’ innovative activities. We study the impacts of the formal protection in SMEs (small and medium enterprises) on innovative activity, but the informal protection does not have a significant impact on innovation. As the protection increases, the incentive innovation is stronger. In addition, we show that the subsidies significantly crowd out private financial input of funded firms, whereas, R&;D subsidies have a negative significant effect on SMEs innovation. However, the above statements have no effect on large firms.
In the third essay, we study how to protect firms’ innovation, i.e., patent or non-patent. First, due to avoid sampling selection bias, the essay adopts the two stage estimation of Heckman. Second, the essay shows that multinational subsidiaries of parent firms with technical advantage will choose non-patent protection. Moreover, when the funded firms escalate, SMEs and large firms adopt patent to protect innovation differing from the current literature. SMEs cooperated with customers and universities will choose patent to protect innovation, but large firms have no significant impact on partner. In the types of innovation, large firms choose patent in new-to-market and new-to-firm process innovation, but the process and production innovation have no significant impact on patent for SMEs.
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