Threshold Effect of Intellectual Property Protection between R&D and Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis from China

Intellectual property protection (IPP) has increasingly become an important factor in China's economic development. Meanwhile, the impact of R&D investment on the domestic economic development has been paid more and more attention, and a large number of previous researches focus on the linear effects of R&D investment on economic development, while studies in view of China's technology and economic development from the perspective of intellectual property protection is very rare. Thus, we empirically test the complex relationship between R&D and economic growth under the influence of the nonlinear threshold feature of intellectual property protection, based on a panel data of 30 provinces in China during the years 2002-2012 by using the panel threshold regression model of Hansen. The research shows that the impact of R&D on economic growth is not limited to a simple linear relationship, which exists the significant nonlinear characteristics of the double threshold of intellectual property protection, that is, R&D input is not the more the better. Overall, the threshold effect of regional heterogeneity is obvious, and R&D input has a nonlinear influence, in particular, changing with the level of IPP.