6.2.3 Results for NEAM Disciplines......................
In this subsection, wefirst analyze factors impacting NEAM research efficiency of
211Us. The detailed results are presented in Table6.5.
6.2.3.1 Environmental Factors
- Regional Economy Conditions
We have four variables to measure regional economy conditions, they are
“Capital”,“Eastern”,“Central”,“JU”and“HSZU”. From the estimation results, it’s
easy tofind that whether located in a capital city has almost no impact on research
efficiency. Compared with western 211Us, eastern 211Us are more efficient, while
the central 211Us are less efficient. But the regional differences are also not sta-
tistically significant. However, those universities which are located in Jing-Jin-Ji or
Hu-Su-Zhe areas are significantly more efficient than universities located in other
eastern areas. It could be that the distribution of Chinese top universities largely
depend on national needs after the founding of New China, so there are a con-
siderable group of universities located in the relative left-behind central or western
regions, while their NEAM research efficiency are relative high.
Furthermore, for the variable of“PerGDP”, its impact on research efficiency is
significantly negative after controlling for other factors. It is contradicted with
earlier researches by other researchers carried out in western countries. Combining
with the founding above, economically developed provinces should pay more
attention to coordinate between university research input increases and efficiency
improvement, and make more efforts to improve the university innovation
capacities.
“SciTech”and“HighTech”are two proxy variables to measure the innovation of
Science and Technology in a particular province. The estimations show that these
variables have positive impacts on NEAM research efficiency, and pass the sig-
nificance tests at 0.1 level in model (1) and (2). This convinces us that regional
innovation is associated with university research productions, but the underlying
factors are needed to be identified further.
- University Cluster
“211Us”and“985Us”are two proxy variables to measure university cluster in a
particular province. The estimation results show that they generally have no sig-
nificant impacts on NEAM research efficiency. This implies that the cluster effect
does not work well in NEAM disciplines of Chinese universities, the cooperation
and communication between universities are not so effective, and the sharing
mechanism is not well-established.
278 6 Exploring Factors Impacting on Research Efficiency...