talented researchers. What most universities neglected in this fast-changing context
was to optimize resource allocation, resulting into their plunges in PTEC indexes,
and offsetting the improvements contributed by technical progress. All these made
HSS disciplines of both groups underperform in TFP index.
by Location 5.3 Differences and Trends on 211Us’Research Productivity
Productivity by Location
China is a nation with a vast territory, the regional economic and social develop-
ment level varies largely. There are also profound gaps in the aspects such as
attracting high-profile researchers, and absorbing research funds from provincial
budget. In this section, considering regional economic gaps, we divide 31 provinces
and municipalities of mainland China into three regions, namely eastern China,
central China and western China, and title those 211Us located in these regions as
eastern 211Us, central 211Us and western 211Us respectively. Furthermore, taking
into account of the traditional geographic distribution of Chinese higher education
institutions, we subdivide eastern 211Us into three subgroups as Jing-Jin-Ji uni-
versities (henceforth JUs), Hu-Su-Zhe universities (henceforth HSZUs), and other
universities (henceforth OUs). In order to compare the regional gaps and trends
between different groups or subgroups, we use the computation results in thefirst
section to get the annual changes of TFP index and its decomposition.
5.3.1 NEAM Disciplines...............................
5.3.1.1 Annual Productivity Changes by Region
In this subsection, we first analyze and compare the annual changes of
Malmquist-TFP index and its decomposition of 211Us in NEAM research among
the different regions categorized above. The detailed results are presented in
Tables5.15,5.16,5.17,5.18,5.19and5.20in Appendix.
In Fig.5.9, we plot thefive-year average of TFP index and its decomposition for
each region in line chart. Since what we calculate is the geometric mean, the
numbers in Fig.5.9indicate the overall changes of TFP index in 2006–2010.
In Fig.5.9, we can see that thefive-year average of TFP index in all regions are
larger than 1, demonstrating that in 2006–2010, the research productivity of 211Us
are all in a growth status.
Among eastern, central and western 211Us, the annual TFP growth of central
211Us is on the top. The annual TFP index of central 211Us is 1.107, which means
that annual TFP growth rate of central 211Us is 10.7% relative to the base year
5.2 Differences and Trends on Research Productivity of 985Us and Non-985Us 233