Using the public data opening pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and constructing a panel dataset of over 1.1 million patent transfers between cities from 2007 to 2021, this study examines the impact of public data opening on the development of a unified national technology market. The findings indicate that public data opening significantly promotes the development of such a market by mitigating information barriers, breaking down administrative hurdles, and reducing trade obstacles.
In terms of urban interaction structures, technology flows are facilitated through a “radiation effect” in center-periphery city pairs and a “complementarity effect” in periphery-periphery city pairs. These effects help narrow the innovation gap between cities and are more pronounced for high-quality invention patents. However, geographical and cultural distances are found to inhibit the policy’s effectiveness.
Therefore, it is recommended to enhance government transparency and reduce transaction costs through institutional measures, strengthen the balanced deployment of digital infrastructure to alleviate spatial friction, and leverage public data platforms to promote technological synergy among cities at different levels. These steps are essential for achieving efficient allocation of technological resources and fostering coordinated regional development.
Additionally, this study makes three marginal contributions. First, it investigates the impact of public data opening on the unified national technology market from the perspective of intercity technology flows, thereby expanding the literature on the economic consequences of data sharing and openness. Existing studies mostly focus on the effects of government data disclosure within jurisdictions, overlooking the spatial attributes of data elements that transcend geographical boundaries.
Second, the theoretical analysis emphasizes barriers to technology flow—such as information, administrative, and trade barriers—and constructs a theoretical framework illustrating how public data opening facilitates cross-regional technology flows by enhancing government transparency, promoting cross-regional enterprise investment, and mitigating market segmentation. This framework not only reveals potential pathways through which data sharing may drive the construction of a unified market, offering theoretical insights for local government practices, but also provides a new perspective on how the effects of public data opening policies propagate through interregional economic linkages.
Third, the study highlights the uneven distribution of technology flows between center and periphery cities, identifies differential policy effects across city tiers, and confirms that public data opening promotes orderly technology flows and coordinated regional innovation development. It also explores the heterogeneous effects of public data opening across different technology attributes, geographical distances, and cultural contexts, offering theoretical and policy implications for building a unified national market.
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