Growth or innovation? The impacts analysis of FDI on performance of China's high-tech zones.

This paper empirically investigates the impacts of FDI on operation and innovation performance of China's national high-tech zones by using the SBM-VRS and Tobit model. The results show that in general, FDI promotes the growth of operation performance of high-tech zones, but has no significant effect on their innovation performance, after controlling the characteristics in cities and high-tech zones level. Furtherly, the paper finds that FDI increases per expenditure on R&D activity, but decreases ratio of technical income, which explains why FDI doesn't have significant effect on innovation performance. Different regions make different sense. FDI has significantly positive effect on operation performance of all high-tech zones located on eastern, central and western regions, while FDI only makes a positive effect on innovation performance of those high-tech zones on western and central region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]