Empirical Analysis on the Correlation of Patent Applications with R&D Input

Patent applications is an important index to measure a country's scientific and technological level, also reflects the scientific research output efficiency of key indicators. Patent applications and research inputs should in theory are closely related. Based on the Cobb-Douglas production function, this study takes the patent applications and R&D input into the model. It uses the data of patent applications, R&D staff and R&D capital expenditure investment in China from 1995 to 2014. The study finds that patent application is closely related to the R&D staff and R&D capital investment. The result shows that the elasticity of R&D capital input is higher than that of R&D staff input in patent input-output model. It also discovers that the characteristic of procedure of patent input-output is increasing returns to scale.