The transition of Chinese S&T institutes since 1980s: policy, performance and implication

Abstract

In 1985 China began its reform on the Science & Technology (S&T) sector which was inherited from a planned economy. The reform over the past 20 years is deemed to be a decisive factor in China’s science and technology progress. The paper first argues that two fundamental tasks of China’s S&T sector reform are to enhance scientific productivity and strengthen the industry-academic relationships. Subsequently, the reform policies are outlined within three categories: 1) reforming the funding system, 2) improving R&D management 3) strengthening industry-academic relationships. The evolution of S&T institutes such as the Chinese Academy of Science is examined to provide micro-level evidence of policy impacts. The scientific output of China’s S&T sector did achieve the remarkable improvement in the reform period, but we also observe the rapidly growing investment from the governments flew into the sector. The evaluation of the performance of the reform needs to examine the scientific productivity of the sector. Therefore, we proceed to measure the scientific productivity of China’s S&T institutes based on the R&D input and output data in the aggregate and provincial level. The Polynomial Distributed Lag model is utilized to uncover the structure of the lag between R&D input and output. The findings based on the aggregate data and provincial data confirm that the scientific productivity of China’s S&T institutes has been decreasing since 1990s. These results call for the future actions that can contribute to enhancing the scientific productivity of China’s S&T institutes.