Abstract: Based on the panel data of 108 cities in 11 provinces along the Yangtze River Economic Belt in 2006-2015, this paper conducts an empirical test of the impact of innovation environment on the regional innovation efficiency by making use of the fixed effect of the special panel metric and the random effect model. Then it conducts a robustness test by employing the space panel autoregressive two-stage least square method. The findings show that the impact of the infrastructure environment at the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Belt on the innovative efficiency is significantly higher than that at the lower reaches, that the promotion effect of economic environment on the innovation efficiency at the upper reaches of the Yangtze River is significant, but not significant at the upper and middle reaches of Yangtze River, that the improvement of the indirect financing environment cannot effectively promote the improvement of regional innovation efficiency, and that the impact of the humanistic education environment and the fiscal environment on regional innovation efficiency is not significant. Thus it is necessary to improve the innovation environment and promote the efficiency of regional technological innovation.

Key words: the Yangtze River Economic Belt; innovation environment; innovation efficiency; spatial econometrics