China’s innovation index will increase by 6% in 2023 compared with the previous year, and investment in innovation continues to increase
On October 25th, the National Bureau of Statistics of China announced that the country’s innovation index reached 165.3 in 2023, compared to a baseline of 100 in 2015. This marks a 6.0% increase from the previous year, indicating a steady growth trend.
When examining the different components of the index, it was found that the innovation environment index, innovation input index, innovation output index, and innovation performance index reached 177.1, 155.0, 199.7, and 129.4, respectively. These figures represent increases of 10.4%, 5.5%, 6.5%, and 0.4% compared to the prior year.
Lin Mei, a statistician from the Department of Social Studies and Culture at the National Bureau of Statistics, pointed out that among the 18 evaluation indicators across the four categories, four specific indices saw growth rates exceeding 10%. These include the index for enterprises benefiting from increased tax deductions, the index for high-value invention patents per ten thousand R&D personnel, the index for the proportion of science and engineering graduates in the eligible population, and the full-time equivalent index for R&D personnel per ten thousand individuals.
These indices reflect a significant improvement in China’s innovation environment. The policy supporting increased deductions for R&D expenses continues to gain strength, with the deduction rate rising and the benefits of these policies being more widely realized. In 2023, approximately 123,000 large-scale industrial enterprises benefited from these tax deduction policies, an increase of 8,000 compared to the previous year.
Investment in innovation is also on the rise. In 2023, China’s R&D expenditure reached 33,357.1 billion yuan, representing an 8.4% increase from last year, securing the country’s position as the second-largest R&D investor globally. The R&D expenditure intensity, measured as the ratio of R&D spending to GDP, stood at 2.65%, up 0.09 percentage points from the previous year, narrowing the gap with the OECD average of 2.73%.
In terms of innovation output, by the end of 2023, the number of effective invention patents within China exceeded 4 million for the first time, reaching a total of 4.015 million, which is a 22.4% increase from the prior year. The quantity of high-value invention patents reached 1.665 million, accounting for 41.5% of all effective invention patents, a 1.1 percentage point rise from last year. Additionally, in 2023, the number of contracts executed in China’s technology market reached 950,000, with a total transaction value of 6.1 trillion yuan, marking increases of 22.5% and 28.6%, respectively, over the previous year.