- Under the circumstances of poor performances of HSS research in most 211Us,
there are also some big gaps between 211Us in different regions. To eastern
211Us, especially the JUs and OUs, their HSS research productivities are
slightly improved. However, to central 211Us, western 211Us, and HSZUs,
their research productivities are decreased more or less. To 211Us in all regions,
growth effect obtained from technical change is the general channel for all
groups to improve their research productivities, and the low-performance of
TEC index, or more specifically the PTEC index, is the major cause to the
slowdown or decline.Thosefindings above have important implications for the university develop-
ment strategy and policy-making in the future. In the aim of building up high-level
universities, those research universities like 211Us, are practicing the same
development mode, characterized by those approaches such as recruiting
high-profile researchers, configuring advanced facilities, and setting up high-level
research platforms with no consideration of the high costs. Most of these approa-
ches are output-oriented, and aimed to produce more outputs by investing more
resources. To some degree, this mode wins strong growth effect for the universities,
especially for their NEAM discipline, which has been proven by our empirical
studies in this book. However, from the long-term perspective, this mode focusing
on high-input-high-output, couldn’t be the best choice for both universities and the
whole nation, since it might result in low efficiency and misallocation of scarce
resources. With the expansion of research production scale of Chinese universities,
the bottleneck effect of resource scarcity and budget constraint will take effect, and
finally contribute to the growing paths characterized by the great leap forward and
instability as analyzed above. In fact, through analyzing gaps between universities
with different titles (e.g. 985 or non-985) and different locations (e.g. eastern or
central), it’s easy tofind that, PTEC and SEC are the determinants of research
productivity improvements. To sum up, if this nation wants to bring sustainable and
robust growth to research productivities, it’s necessary to guide 211Us to pay much
more attention to optimize resource allocation, fulfill research potential, and activate
inner motivations, by the approaches such as institutional innovations and sys-
tematic reforms.
Appendix
See Tables5.3,5.4,5.5,5.6,5.7,5.8,5.9,5.10,5.11,5.12,5.13,5.14,5.15,5.16,
5.17,5.18,5.19,5.20,5.21,5.22,5.23,5.24,5.25and5.26.
5.4 Conclusions 245