Innovation in the Asia Pacific by Thomas Clarke & Keun Lee

Author:Thomas Clarke & Keun Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

The Data

The NBS-SIPO Firm-Level Patent Database

National Bureau of Statistics of China and SIPO started a collaboration in 2007 to match SIPO patents that have been granted to large and medium size Chinese industrial firms with these firms’ financial and technology indicators that are part of the large and medium size industrial enterprises (LME) census database. The resulting database is what we use for the current analysis, which covers the period of 2007 to 2011. For each LME, we know the numbers of their patent applications and grants by year. The patent counts are available for three types of patents: invention patents, utility models and designs.3 In addition, the database also includes information on the number of patents that are “in force” for the three types of patents. These are patents that have been granted and have not lapsed because the firms have paid renewal fees to maintain their legal status. Since designs are usually considered a different and more rudimentary type of innovation from those protected by invention patents and utility models, for the current analysis we will concentrate on the latter two categories of patents.

There have been other efforts to match SIPO patents to the Chinese firms that own them. And all these researchers did the matching by comparing the name of a firm in a firm database with the name of a patent applicant in the SIPO database. For example, He et al. (2013) matched SIPO patents to publicly listed Chinese firms; Holmes et al. (2015) identified the SIPO patents for a sample of multinational corporations operating in China; and Xie and Zhang (2015) matched SIPO patent data with the widely diffused “above scale” Chinese industrial firm database.

Our database is unique in that it is constructed using the firm’s legal person code, rather than name in the matching. Each Chinese enterprise is assigned a unique legal person code by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of China. And SIPO and NBS have used that code to link the SIPO patent database with the NBS large and medium size enterprise database. This approach has the advantage of eliminating the ambiguity and error created by the different ways a firm’s name is recorded in various databases.

The number of industrial LMEs, as reported in Table 8.1, ranged from 36,251 in 2007 to 60,391 in 2011. In 2011 NBS changed the criteria by which an enterprise qualifies as a large or medium size enterprise for the industrial census. This explains the large jump in the number of LMEs from 2010 to 2011. Manufacturing consistently accounted for around 90% of all LMEs. Among manufacturing LMEs, 19,546 enterprises appeared in all five years in the database. These firms constitute the balanced sample that our statistical analysis is based on.Table 8.1The LME sample

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