Empirical analysis of economic growth promotion through standardization through technological innovation pathway

Drawing from the framework of endogenous growth theory, technological innovation plays a pivotal role in driving economic expansion. This study, building upon empirical investigations into the impact of technological standardization on economic growth, examines the magnitude of the effect of technological innovation as an intermediary variable in this pathway and formulates corresponding hypotheses. Considering the specific context of China and the evolution of standardization, we conduct research encompassing technological standardization, technological innovation, and economic growth within a unified framework, utilizing China's macroeconomic data spanning from 1989 to 2019 as our dataset. We employ Pearson correlation tests and address multicollinearity issues by applying ridge regression in conjunction with the results of collinearity tests and the mediation model derived from traditional multiple linear regression. This approach yields more stable parameter values. Furthermore, a comparative international analysis was conducted, leading to conclusions and recommendations regarding the achievement of economic growth through the intermediate variable pathway involving the consideration of technological standardization.


INTRODUCTION
In China, one of a dominant force in the world of manufacturing, the development of its manufacturing sector is closely entwined with the establishment and enhancement of standards.Standards assurance forms the bedrock of quality in Chinese manufacturing, and the continual improvement of standards is the driving force behind the progress of Chinese manufacturing capabilities.The global expansion of Chinese manufacturing is also underpinned by adherence to standards.With the establishment and international dissemination of standards, such as those in high-speed rail and 5G technology, the importance of standards for economic growth is increasingly recognized.To support the evolution and upgrading for the manufacturing industry, standardization is an integral component of global smart manufacturing strategies [1].From an attribute perspective, standards encompass foundational standards, technical standards, management standards, and operational standards, among others.Among these, technical standards hold significant importance due to their instrumental role in shaping the development of businesses, industrial upgrading, and even national competitiveness, making them a strategic resource and a fundamental element of comprehensive competitiveness for a country or region.
The association between standardization and economic development has garnered the attention by scholars.Standardization impacts various phases of economic activities, including research and development, production, and market penetration, thus exerting significant collective effects on market structure, productivity and innovation [2].Additionally, the influence of technological standardization on economic growth is more pronounced at the national level compared to the regional level, with a more significant economic growth effect observed in regions with higher levels of technological standardization [3].Standards are recognized as a vital factor in promoting economic growth, and technological innovation is a cornerstone of economic growth [4].However, current economic growth theories tend to overlook the role of standardization [5].Technological standardization can enhance a firm's technological capabilities, accelerate industrial technological development, and drive technological innovation [6].Based on macroeconomic data from China spanning from 1985 to 2007, significant econometric relationships were found between patents and technological standards [7].Standardization has the potential to synchronize disparate technological innovations into systematic innovations, thereby creating new markets [8].
The mechanism through which technological standards promote economic growth, along with the factors and mediators in this promotion pathway, constitutes the central focus of this study.Theoretically, technological standardization acts on economic growth through technological innovation.Therefore, this study introduces technology innovation as a mediating variable and uses existing macroeconomic data from China to examine the role of technology innovation between technological standardization and economic growth.This research holds significant importance in helping guide standardization efforts in China towards feasible measures and pathways for promoting economic growth.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESES 2.1 Analysis of the effects of technological standardization on economic growth
There have been relevant theoretical analysis and empirical study on the effect of standardization on economic development.In theory, most of the existing studies are related to the analysis and demonstration of the mechanism of standardization promoting economic growth.Technical standardization was an important contributor in various fields, and standards significantly promote effect on foreign trade and economic growth [9].Technology standardization can promote economic development by acting on various factors, and to a certain extent, it can also adversely affect economic development by hindering innovation and other factors [10].However, from the current research, the majority studied on the effect of technological standardization on the economy have concluded that the driving effect of technology standardization on the economy is far greater than its hindering effect.According to above, the following assumption is proposed.H1: technology standardization can promote economic growth.

The technological innovation and mediating effects
According to modern growth theory, technological innovation is considered a primary promoter for economic development [11].It can enhance productivity, improve products and services, stimulate market competition, ultimately propelling economic growth.This theoretical foundation provides ample support for our selection of technological innovation as the intermediary variable.Endogenous growth theory posits that the progress of technology is the determinant of sustained economic growth [12].In macroeconomics, national income is influenced by net exports, government expenditure, investment and consumption.Therefore, consumption, investment, and exports are considered sources of economic growth, often referred to as the "three engines" driving economic growth [13].So, the question arises: does China currently exhibit an intermediary effect of technological standardization on economic growth through technological innovation?With this question in mind, this study chooses technological innovation as the mediating variable and explores its effect in the relations between technological standardization and economic growth.By combining endogenous growth theory with mediation analysis, this research is grounded in a strong theoretical framework, making the results more interpretable and persuasive.

2.2.1
The relationship between technological innovation and technological standardization.The relationship between technological standardization and technological innovation is both contradictory and unified.As the basis of technological innovation, technical standards help to provide support for subsequent technological innovation and encourage technological innovation to make progress.In turn, the technological upgrading and new technologies brought about by technological innovation promote the upgrading of technical standards, and the relationship between the two is a spiral rise and mutual promotion.At the same time, the formulation of technical standards is likely to result in the lock-in of some technologies and weaken the innovation willingness of enterprises, thus hindering technological innovation to a certain extent, especially the low-level and low-level technical standards [14].Standards are a collection of explicit knowledge with a certain scientific and technological content.Standardization is actually an activity to establish and implement standards for repetitive things and concepts in order to ensure product quality, maintain production order and improve economic benefits.As the name suggests, technical standardization is a standardization activity at the technical level.Sadahiko Kano studied the relationship between technological innovation and standardization in the mobile communication industry and believed that an important role played by technological standardization was to systematize the messy and disorderly technological innovation in order to create a new market [15].Allen studied cases in different fields and found that technical standards can promote and hinder enterprise innovation at the same time, but in general, the benefits of design and manufacturing innovation standards exceed the possible limitations imposed by these standards on creativity [16].In general, technological standards provide a support and basis for technological innovation.Innovation is the successful application and expansion of these bases in the context of standards, and the continuous evolution of technological innovation in turn promotes the innovation of technological standards.Finally, through new technologies and new processes, the optimization and upgrading of the industry and the upgrading of the industrial structure are realized, which ultimately acts on the entire macro-economy and promotes the sustainable development of the macro-economy.
According to above, the following assumption is proposed.H2: technological innovation has an intermediary effect in the promotion of economic growth by technological standardization.
This paper only uses a mediating variable of technological innovation.The purpose is to maintain the focus of research and ensure the clarity and explicability of research issues.Although there are multiple mediating variables that may be related to technical standardization, in some cases, using only one mediating variable can make the research more concise and easier to explain.This simplification helps to reduce confusion factors and makes the research results easier to understand and apply to actual policymaking.

Mediating effect analysis.
Mediating effect analysis is a process of applying statistical methods to investigate whether the predictive effect of independent variables on dependent variables can be explained by mediating variables and the size of the effect explained.Mediation effect analysis is not only helpful to determine whether the dependent variable is directly affected by the independent variable, but also to explore the indirect influence of the independent variable on the dependent variable through which intermediary variables, to reveal the path and mechanism of the independent variable on the dependent variable.It has been greatly valued by scholars in the academic community and is widely used in psychology and other social sciences.
This is the most basic and simple mediation effect model.Y is the dependent variable, X is the independent variable and M is mediating variable.Where C is the total effect of X on Y, a is the effect of X on the intermediary variable m, then it is the direct effect of X on Y after controlling the intermediary variable, and b indicates the effect of the mediating variable M on Y when considering the control variables for X on Y.The key point of mediating effect test is the significance test of coefficient product ab.The basic mediation effect models have been continuously developed, including multiple, multilevel, category variable mediation models, mediation models with mediation and mediation models with regulation [17].

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS 3.1 Model and Method
Based on the above theoretical analysis and mediation effect test method, the following econometric models are established: Among them, GDP represents economic development level, STD represents technological standardization development level, and M represents the mediating variable.In this model, it is technological innovation (PAT), and control represents the control variable.Models (2), ( 3) and ( 4) respectively represent the effect of technological standardization on economic growth and innovation, and the joint impact of technological standardization and intermediary on economic growth.
Causal stepwise regression and bootstrap are the two most frequently used methods for mediating effect analysis.The causal stepwise regression method is mainly divided into three steps: firstly, the total effect can be computed; then the significance of the product ab would be tested, but the sequential test method is used, as the name suggests, that is, to test the significance of a and b in turn; the direct effect of X on Y can be computed in the third step.at this time, we can distinguish between complete mediation and partial mediation according to the relevant results.The bootstrap method is relatively simple, because it directly tests the significance of the coefficient product ab based on the total effect of X on Y.The causal stepwise regression method of Baron and Kenny is mostly used to analyze the mediating effect in the existing studies [18].
In addition, when considering the effect of technology standardization on economic development, this paper adopts the method of controlling each component of GDP, which is an important approach when considering potential confounding factors.The application of logarithmic transformation of data is to meet the preconditions of statistical analysis and help reduce the impact of outliers on the results.Ridge regression is used as an analysis method because it can effectively solve the problem of multicollinearity.
Based on this, this paper uses stepwise regression method to conduct intermediary analysis and uses ridge regression method to obtain the correlation coefficient of each equation and test the significance in turn.This paper adopts a new improved mediation effect test process, as shown in Figure 2.

Variable selection and data source
The standardization law of the people's Republic of China shall enter into force as of April 1st, 1989.The economic data after 2020, due to the impact of the new crown epidemic effect, may lead to a large deviation between the standardization and economic analysis results.Therefore, the macroeconomic data from 1989 to 2019 is used to demonstrate the relationship between China's technology standardization based on the intermediary variable of technological innovation and economic development.The explained variable is GDP, which reflects China's annual economic development level.
In the variable's selection of technological innovation, this paper selects the total number of utility model patents and invention patents as the measurement variable of technological innovation.There are three main types of patents are design patents, utility model patents and invention patents.However, design patents usually do not involve technological or functional innovation and focus more on the appearance beauty and design features of products.As a result, they are generally used to represent design innovation rather than technological innovation.Therefore, if we want to represent technological innovation, we will usually focus more on invention patents and utility model patents.
In regression analysis, the control variables are used to consider the effects of other variables on the dependent variable, in order to eliminate other potential influencing factors to the greatest extent, and estimate the relationship between the independent variable (explanatory variable) and the dependent variable more accurately and to test the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable more accurately.The four components of GDP are investment, consumption, net exports and government purchases.Based on the above four components, this paper selects the total investment in fixed assets, total retail sales of consumer goods, net exports of goods and services, government consumption as the control variables.
The dataset in the research is mainly from the National Bureau of statistics, of which the stock data of technical standards are from the China Science and Technology Statistics Yearbook and the national public service platform for standards information.Taking 1989 as the base year of statistics, the deflator of GDP is used to deflate the economic variables in the variables, excluding the influence of price factors.

Regression results and analysis
Before regression, this paper made Pearson correlation diagnosis on the data.Combined with the collinearity test results of multiple linear regression, it can be concluded that there is a collinearity relationship between some economic variables.To make the model  Net exports of goods and services more stable, this paper uses the processing method of ridge regression to obtain the correlation coefficient and significance, so as to further analyze the intermediary of technological innovation.In addition, in econometrics, when designing the analysis of variables related to market value, the variables studied are often treated with logarithm, which can analyze the elasticity of independent variables, that is, the corresponding percentage change relationship, so that the model has better economic interpretation effect.On the other hand, logarithmic processing can help to stabilize the distribution of variables and reduce the influence of outliers, which can effectively reduce the heteroscedasticity of data.In this paper, we use ridge regression to obtain more stable regression parameter values after logarithm processing of the data in the effective intermediary analysis.First, according to the test procedure in Figure 2 and the ridge regression results of SPSS in Table 2, the coefficient of STD in model (2) represents that every 100% increase in technical standardization will promote economic growth by 21.8%, with high economic significance.At the same time, the coefficient of STD is positive and significant at the level of 1%, which is statistically significant, thus verifying the hypothesis that technology standardization can promote economic growth.
Second, for the intermediary variable of technological innovation, the regression coefficient of STD and the coefficient passed the t-test at the significance level of 1%, which showed that technological standardization greatly promoted technological innovation in the case of overall innovation in various industries from 1989 to 2019.It shows that every 100% increase in the level of technical standardization, the corresponding increase in technological innovation is 259.9%.
Third, from the regression results of model ( 4), we can see that the direct effect of STD on unit economic growth is 16.1%.Combined with the improved test process of mediating analysis, the significance of the regression coefficient and was tested in turn, and both were significant at the level of 1%.This model introduces the collinearity test to solve the problem of multicollinearity, which may lead to the difference between c and c' + ab.Therefore, the calculation error is allowed within a reasonable range.Because the indirect effect of STD through M technological innovation is between 5.7% and 8.6%, the coefficient is significant, and the H2 hypothesis is true.Intermediary variable m technological innovation plays a partial intermediary role between technological standardization and economic growth, and the intermediary effect is about one third of the total effect, which provides data support for technological standardization to promote economic growth through technological innovation.
According to the above table, using the data from 1989 to 2019 about China's technological standardization and economic development, it is found that in promoting economic growth, technological standardization has a significant positive role.In terms of the total effect, every 100% increase in technological standardization will promote economic growth by 21.8%.Among them, technological innovation has a mediating role in the relations between technological standardization and economic growth, and the indirect effect of technological innovation is between 5.7% and 8.6%.That is, about one-third of the increase of technology standardization promotes economic development due to the intermediary path of technological innovation.
In addition, in this study, the direct effect and indirect effect are slightly larger than the total effect, but in terms of the results, the range of difference values can still ensure the rationality of the model.The mechanism of mediating effect is not only composed of direct effect and indirect effect.There may be other variables or mechanisms not considered that affect the distribution of effects.There may be a multi-level and multi-path relationship among technological standardization, technological innovation and economic growth, but this does not weaken the key role of technological innovation in promoting economic growth.This study uses a single mediating variable to explore the relations between technology standardization and economic development, better control other possible confounding factors, and help to guarantee the internal validity of the results.

DISCUSSION AND SUGGESTIONS 4.1 Discussion
While studying the impact of China's technology standardization on economic growth, this paper pays attention to the horizontal comparison to observe the international position in the contribution of China's standardization to economic development, and briefly analyzes the possible reasons for the high contribution of standardization to economic growth.As shown in Table 3, this paper collates and refers to the research results of the contribution of technology standardization to the economic growth rate in Germany, France, United Kingdom and Canada in different years [19].By comparing the previous research results of other countries, the contribution of China's degree of standardization to the economic growth rate is relatively high, only lower than that of Germany's 27.27% and France's 23.54%.The elasticity of China's technology standardization to economic growth is 21.8%, which is significantly higher than that of Britain and Canada.
For the comparability of the regression results for horizontal comparison, this paper selects the relevant data of the manufacturing industry of various countries in 2019, which is consistent with the final deadline in the empirical study of 2019.In view of the more urgent need of the manufacturing industry for standards and specifications, countries with a high proportion of manufacturing industry usually rely on the production of physical products, which usually need to meet strict technical standards to guarantee the quality, reliability of products.Therefore, countries with a high proportion of manufacturing may be more inclined to develop and comply with technical standards to ensure that products meet technical standards.Therefore, the relationship between manufacturing industry and standardization is closer, and the scale of manufacturing industry is also the key factor to objectively drive economic growth.This paper selects the relevant data of manufacturing industry to compare and discuss the research results of standards and GDP growth rate in the above countries.The relevant data of the manufacturing industry are estimated based on the statistical data  4.
As a large manufacturing country, Germany's manufacturing industry accounts for 22.7% of its GDP and 8.316 million people are employed in the manufacturing industry.Germany's economy is relatively more dependent on the manufacturing industry, which may make Germany pay more attention to technical standardization to ensure the quality, safety and international competitiveness of manufacturing products.On the other hand, countries with more manufacturing employment usually have more professional skilled labor.Professional and technical personnel may better understand and be able to promote the formulation and compliance of technical standardization, participate in the standard formulation process, and ensure that the standards comply with industry practice.In the international market, manufacturing products usually need to comply with various international technical standards and regulations.If a country's manufacturing enterprises can formulate and comply with these standards, they will be easier to enter and participate in the global market.In Germany, technology standardization can provide manufacturing enterprises with opportunities for international market access, promote exports and international trade, and thus bring opportunities for national economic growth.
It can be seen that technology standardization is of significant importance to the economic improvement of different countries.However, the extent of this impact will vary according to national conditions, industrial structure and market advantages.Standardization affects technological innovation and diffusion.The research results of technology on economic growth show that technology accounts for one-third to more than half of GDP growth in the United States [20].Combined with the research results of the above developed countries, technology standardization plays an important role in promoting economic growth.In addition, Hudson and Jones said that international standardization helps developing countries produce higher quality products, thus promoting international trade and economic growth [21].
As a large manufacturing country, China has a huge manufacturing labor force.It has a great significance to study the effect of technology standardization on economic growth in China.

Conclusion and suggestion
This study uses a single intermediary variable to study the relationship between technology standardization and economic development, better control other possible confounding factors, and help to guarantee the internal validity of the research results.According to the data since the implementation of the standardization law of the people's Republic of China in 1989, by the end of 2019 before the outbreak, according to the actual data, it is found that technology standardization plays a significant role in promoting the improvement of the economy.In terms of the total effect, every 100% increase in technology standardization will promote economic growth by 21.8%.Among them, technological innovation is the intermediary variable, and the indirect effect of technological standardization driving economic upgrading through this important intermediary path is between 5.7% and 8.6%, that is, about one third of the promotion of economic growth by technological standardization is due to the intermediary path of technological innovation.
As technology improves by leaps and bounds, technological innovation plays an increasingly important role in mediating the relationship between technological standardization and economic growth.The government should formulate policies to encourage enterprises to actively participate in technical standardization, establish an open standard platform, train technical standardization talents, and increase government support for technological innovation projects, so as to further enhance the role of technical standardization in promoting economic development.First, promote the establishment of standards.Through incentive policies, we should guide all industries to establish and formulate widely accepted technical standards, affirm the "sharing" value of standards as public goods, reduce the preparation cost investment of standard setters, put an end to the indiscriminate charging behavior of excessive production standards by the associations that publish standards and industry management, build a multi-party shared standardized information platform, and integrate and share resources.Secondly, build a bridge between technology standardization and technology innovation transformation, so that technology standardization can more adapt to and serve technology innovation, to accelerate innovation, establish an effective and scientific technology standard evaluation mechanism, build a bridge between standards to promote technology innovation and the transformation and application of technological achievements, and improve the construction level of technology standards.Finally, promote national technology standardization in line with international standards, actively participate in international technology standardization cooperation, share best standard practices and practical achievements in innovation with other countries, including the "belt and road" countries, expand the adoption rate and influence of Chinese standards, promote Chinese enterprises to better integrate into the global value chain, provide broader market opportunities for domestic enterprises, and promote international trade and technological innovation.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: The structural framework of the model

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Inspection process by using mediation analysis

Table 1 :
Symbols and meanings of each variable variable STD Technical standardization: Technical standard stock Dependent variable GDP Economic development: Gross Domestic Product Mediating variable PAT M1 : Total number of applications for technological innovation by invention patents and utility model patents Control variable FIX Total investment in fixed assets of the whole society TRS Total retail sales of social consumer goods GC Government consumption NX

Table 2 :
Regression results of mediating effect test Note: *, * *, * * * respectively indicate the values passing the t-test at the significance level of 10%, 5% and 1%

Table 3 :
Research results of national standards and GDP growth rate

Table 4 :
Proportion of manufacturing industry in GDP and employment in various countries