Establishing science parks everywhere? Misallocation in R&D and its determinants of science parks in China

The establishment of science parks is a vital strategy to develop high-tech industries and facilitate innovations in China. The success of a science park depends heavily on its supportive environment, suggesting that it is hard to replicate everywhere, while China has established many science parks across regions in the past decade. This study evaluates the degree of misallocation in research and development (R&D) and its determinants across science parks in China. Based on an unbalanced panel data of 145 science parks for the period 2007–2014, we find that the overall R&D efficiency has decreased sharply since 2011 when China began to initiate many new science parks. The newly constructed science parks exhibit a lower R&D efficiency than their incumbent parks, suggesting a considerable misallocation in R&D resource caused by expanding science parks everywhere. We further investigate the determinants of R&D misallocation and find that park characteristics and environmental characteristics matter. Parks which are larger, older, and having a higher human quality experience a lower R&D misallocation. Parks with closer R&D collaboration with universities or research institutes, particularly with universities, exhibit a lower R&D misallocation.