The Impact of Technology Innovation on Enterprise Capacity Utilization—Evidence from China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt

This paper analyzes the impact of technology innovation on capacity utilization of enterprises located in the Yangtze River Economic Belt through logic reasoning and empirical modeling. Our analysis shows that the mechanism of how technology innovation affects capacity utilization is that the former promotes the latter through meeting market demand, improving production and management efficiency, and optimizing industrial structures. Our empirical results indicate that the influence of technology innovation on the capacity utilization of enterprises in the Yangtze River Economic Belt evidently possesses positive “U” characteristics. Compared with the upstream and downstream regions of the river, the technology innovation of enterprises in the middle reaches can break the U-shaped inflection point earlier. Compared with light industrial enterprises, heavy industrial enterprises can also break the U-shaped inflection point earlier. Compared with non-overcapacity enterprises, those with overcapacity can break the U-shaped inflection point earlier. The technology innovation of non-state-owned enterprises has obvious positive “U” characteristics in the impact of capacity utilization, while the technology innovation of state-owned enterprises has no significant impact on capacity utilization.