The importance of innovation and entrepreneurship in China’s social transformation

• Main Author: SHEN, Guo Jun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Innovation; entrepreneurship; social transformation; China; Asian Studies; Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/309; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1311&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

As world’s second largest economy, China has seen tremendous changes since its 1978 “open door and reform” policy. Different reformations in form of policies were planned and rolled out to release the potential of productivity. At the same time, social development also seen a huge progress. How the reformation been transformed to social development and in what degree? This is the question was answered in this dissertation. I studied four major reformations covering: State owned Enterprises (SoE), land, financial liberalization, and science and technology, and their impacts on the social development. At macro level, I identified mediation effects of entrepreneurship activities and innovation activities. Entrepreneurship activities show mediation effect for SoE and financial reformation, on social development; while for land reformation, a partial mediation effect is identified under longer lagging period. Innovation activities shows mediation effect for science and technology reformation, on social development. I did comprehensive robustness checking to test hypothesis under different settings, which including different DVs, IVs, mediator, as well as different lagging periods. At micro level I did a secondary analysis on China’s Fintech unicorn company Ant Financial. Both macro and micro level studies suggest that entrepreneurship activities and innovation activities play important role in transforming policies’ impact to social development.