Abstract:
The issue of the connection between innovation activity and productivity growth is rather popular among researchers, but there is still no consensus on this relationship. The purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of a number of external factors at the regional and city levels on the productivity of individual enterprises in the Ural Federal District. To achieve this goal, we use the micro-level data of more than 27,000 enterprises for the period from 2006 to 2015 as well as the data of the regional level published by Federal State Statistics Service. As the main analysis tool, the authors apply panel regression with fixed effects at the firm level. The paper considers both the Ural enterprises in general and their individual subgroups, separated by the type of produced goods and by the size. The main results of the work are following. There is a positive impact of the number of patent applications per capita and technology imports on company productivity, with greater effects observed for more «traditional» industrial groups. While for high-tech industries, these indicators are insignificant. This as well as the negative impact of spending for innovations on the dependent variable point to an inadequate level of development of basic industries, which, in turn, slows the growth rates of technologically intensive industries. Among the Ural firms, there is a stable positive influence of high specialization of cities, which indicates the possibility of successful formation of industrial clusters and mono- settlements. We also draw attention that larger firms in the Ural Federal District are more susceptible to external effects, such as the innovative climate, spatial effects. Therefore, the innovation policy should be aimed at precisely such firms to get the most benefits. The obtained results are proposed to use as a recommendation for the development and improvement of the regional innovation policy.
