Abstract: In the mechanism of economic growth driven by technological innovation, in addition to the total scale of innovation, the internal structure of innovation may also affect economic growth. By making use of the patent data and economic data of China’s 30 regions between 2001 and 2016, this paper applies GMM to investigate the effects of technological specialization on the economic growth of regions with different innovation ability from the aspects of concentration degree and difference degree of the technological structures. Then it goes further to analyze the relationship between the degree of specialization and the economic growth in different regions in a special field of technology. The findings show that technological specialization is to the disadvantage of the economic growth of the regions with higher innovation capability, but it is helpful to the economic growth of regions with lower and medium innovation capability. As for different regions, there are different U-shaped relationships between the degree of specialization and economic growth in specific technical fields. Thus the regions with lower innovation capability should not follow the regions with higher capability when choosing the key fields to develop innovation, instead, they should choose diversified development paths according to their industrial advantages respectively.

Key words: technological innovation; specialization; economic growth; nonlinear relationship; generalized method of moment