Efficiency evaluation of manufacturing firms in China. The case of patent-intensive industries

In an environment where there is a consistent change in the flow of innovation improvement, the advancement of innovation and technology has turned into an inevitable subject of present day enterprises, yet there exists little knowledge about their efficiency from the view point of patent-intensive industries The level of technological innovation efficiency of patent-intensive industries has an effect on the industrial structure and industrial competitiveness. This paper therefore evaluates the technology innovation efficiency of China's patent-intensive industries using the two-stage non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) over the period of 2006-2015. Based on the results, we find the following implications: first, in the technological development phase, the technical efficiency of most of the industries were very low in majority of the years resulting in a very low scale income and very high projection adjustment secondly, in the technical transformation phase, all the patent-intensive industries were not technically efficient causing. [Submitted 25 May 2018; Accepted 26 May 2020]