Empirical Analysis on Promoting Industrial Transformation and Upgrading in Zhejiang Province by Enhancing Intellectual Property Protection

This paper aims to reveal the relationship between intellectual property protection (IPP) and industrial transformation and upgrading (T&U) in southeastern China’s Zhejiang Province. Taking five representative industries as objects, the shift-share analysis was adopted to measure the T&U level of each industry, with the total output in 2004–2019 as the basis. The results show that wholesale and retail, lodging and catering, finance, and real estate are the four advantageous industries. Further, the authors calculated Pearson’s correlation coefficients between IPP intensity and the T&U levels of the four industries. By the coefficients, the four industries can be ranked in descending order as lodging and catering (0.8743), real estate (0.6908), wholesale and retail (0.5891), and finance (0.5468). In addition, the IPP was found to be positively correlated with total manufacturing output (0.8027). Hence, the IPP can significantly promote the development of these five industries.