Place-Based Innovation and Competitiveness Policy
Prof. Anthony HOWELL
Director, Center of Technology, Data, and Society,
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management
Arizona State University
Date: 29 August 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: E22-G008
Host: Prof. Leona Shao Zhi LI, Assistant Professor in Business Economics
Abstract
This presentation considers the role of place-based innovation policies in enhancing firm and regional competitiveness, with a particular focus on initiatives in the United States and China. First, I will provide a brief overview of the new regional engines of innovation program enacted in the US aimed to spur innovation in core technologies and regional competitiveness. Next, I consider China’s economic development zones (EDZs), assessing their impacts on firm innovation and international competitiveness through the lens of a natural experiment involving zone closures enacted in the mid-2000s. Relative to firms that remain in an operational EDZ, the main results find that an EDZ closure leads to firms to become less innovative and exhibit lower exporting performance, especially to the US and other OECD destination markets. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that some firms are better positioned to mitigate adverse effects, particularly ones with closer technological proximity to local industry leaders.
Speaker
Prof. Anthony HOWELL is the Director of the Center on Technology, Data, and Society and an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management in the School of Public Affairs at ASU. He is an affiliate faculty member in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and a senior sustainability scientist in the School of Global Futures. Prior to ASU, Prof. HOWELL served as an Associate Professor of Applied Microeconomics in the School of Economics at Peking University. He also previously held several visiting positions as a Fulbright scholar at the Lincoln Institute of Urban Development and Land Policy (Beijing), a Science & Technology policy fellow at the National Academies of Sciences (Washington D.C.), and a research fellow at the Asian Development Bank (Manila). Prof. HOWELL holds a PhD in Geography (UCLA), M.S. degrees in Statistics (UCLA) and GIScience (MSU), and B.A degrees in Political Science, International Development, and Chinese Language and Culture (MSU).
All are welcome!
