Jie Zhang

Date of Award

6-2022

Advisor(s)

Xiaobo Zhang

Second Advisor

Sarah Wu

Third Advisor

Jingtong He

Abstract

With the change of China's economic development stage and industrial structure, as well as the evolution of global macroeconomic situation, China's patent system has been continuously improving, going through the course of introduction from abroad, legislation, and four times of amendment. China's scientific and technological innovation capacity has also been constantly advancing. At the new development stage, the model of "increasing quantity through incentives and improving quality through introduction" no longer suits the current Chinese economic level and social development. Patents have entered the stage of high-quality development. This dissertation attempts to analyze the development process of patent system, the development of patent quality, the characteristics of patent funding policy and the policy effect in China from the perspectives of law and economy. On one hand, based on the IP law, it streamlines and analyzes the evolution, characteristics, and deficiencies of the patent law in China and patent funding policies, clearly defines patent-related concepts to lay a legal foundation for analysis from economics perspective. On the other hand, based on theories of innovation economics, institutional economics, and econometrics, it also studies the spatial and temporal distribution of patent law and patent funding policies and their impact on patent quality through statistical analysis and econometric models.

Firstly, based on the existing theories and literature and by collecting and organizing regulations related to the patent system and patent law, the dissertation analyzes the introduction and evolution process of China's patent system, explores its internal and external driving factors, and finds that the transition from “passive approach” to “active learning” of China's existing patent system was caused by the combination of the international economic situation and domestic economic and social development needs. It further selects the patent law amendments in 2000 and 2008 as the interval time points, and tests with the OLS regression analysis model. The results show that in 2000, amendments to the patent law greatly improved the quality of patents in China, while that in 2008 has no positive impact on the improvement of patent quality.

Secondly, the dissertation streamlines and sums up the key measures taken by China to guide the high-quality development of patents from policy perspective, and explores the motives of irregular application behavior and the problems of patent policy in China. By collecting information on provincial patent funding in previous years, it finds that patent funding policy is widely adopted. By 2017, all provinces had issued relevant policies. The study also finds that although the provincial policies are continuously optimized and adjusted, a mismatch of resources persists and the patent quality has not been obviously boosted.

Lastly, since there is no unified international evaluation method for high-quality patents, this dissertation finally selects nine single-dimensional indicators to measure patent quality and uses seven single indicator to build a simple patent comprehensive quality evaluation system based on the screening principles of relevance, accessibility, comparability, orientation, and scientific and through analysis of indicators and Pearson's correlation coefficient. It then constructs a panel fixed-effect model, empirically analyzes the influence of patent funding policy on invention patent with the targets and quota adjustment that first appeared in the patent funding policy after 2007 as explanatory variables, and finds that patent funding policy has a significant effect on the amount of patent applications and grants and an insignificant effect on improvement of both patent quality in other single dimension and the patent comprehensive quality.

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