The Impact of Government Subsidies on Technological Innovation in Agribusiness: The Case for China

Abstract

With the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy and the promotion of agricultural and rural modernization, the subsidies enjoyed by agricultural enterprises in China are increasing. As a result, the effectiveness of government subsidies for the technological innovation of agricultural enterprises has attracted more and more attention. Based on the perspectives of the whole industry chain of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fisheries, and of processing, manufacturing, circulation, and service, this paper takes the listed agricultural companies from 2007 to 2019 as a research sample and empirically tests the effects and mechanisms of government subsidies on the technological innovation of agricultural enterprises. The study applies the fixed effect and intermediary effect models. The findings show that government subsidies potentially encourage agricultural enterprises to grow more successfully. Moreover, R&D expenditure is essential for enterprise technological innovation and leads to an intermediate impact. At the same time, government subsidies for the technological innovation of agricultural enterprises have a certain heterogeneity between different industries, state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises, and large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises. Therefore, this study argues that the government should continue to raise subsidies. In addition, the subsidies should be “different from enterprise to enterprise”, and government subsidy funds should be better supervised to foster agricultural technological innovation properly.