Abstract: China is implementing the strategy of innovation-driven development, and it should pay more attention to the two ways of promoting technological innovation in economic growth including technology import and independent R&D. If the integration of technology import and independent R&D is realized, it would be beneficial to narrow the technological gap. However the process of integration would not evolve spontaneously unless there is a good institutional environment. If without innovation of independent R&D, only technological imitation can′t narrow the technological gap. Owing to the spillover of technology, there are different degrees of informal transfer of technology and difficulty in introducing technologies under various levels of intellectual property protection. As is well known that intellectual property transaction can be considered as the organic combination of allocative efficiency and impetus efficiency. Meanwhile the spread of knowledge may be maximized by the allocative efficiency, and innovation may be encouraged by the impetus efficiency which is based on the idea of monopoly. Comparatively speaking, the underdeveloped countries usually tend to underline allocative efficiency and relax accordingly the regulations of intellectual property rights as well as the law enforcement power; however, the developed countries generally emphasize the impetus efficiency. As far as the theoretical analysis results are considered, when imitation prevails, the improvement of intellectual property protection level will encourage the technological innovation behavior of enterprises in backward countries in general, at the same time the intensity of technological transaction will increase. As there are internal relations among the protection of intellectual property rights, the intensity of intellectual property transactions and technological innovation, the intensity of intellectual property transactions can be taken as an intermediate link variable in order to analyze the impact of both the technology introduction and the independent research and development on economic growth. After considering the intellectual property transaction intensity as the threshold variable, this paper adopted the threshold model to make comparative analysis and got the following conclusions, technology import played more obvious roles as a whole in promoting economic growth than the independent R&D did from 2001 to 2015; technology import and independent R&D under low intellectual property transaction intensity as well as larger intellectual property transaction scale would promote more China′s economic growth; serious patent infringement could hinder economic growth. If the intellectual property protection is insufficient, there would be serious market failure in the field of technological innovation, even if it promotes economic growth obviously in the short-term, it will not be conductive to economic growth in the long-term due to lack of independent innovation. Finally, this paper proposes the following policy suggestion: first, in view of the important influence of technology introduction on China′s economic growth, there should be more reason in the process of technology introduction. Second, in the light of the uncertainty of the role of independent research and development in promoting economic growth, not only the direction of independent research and development should be timely changed and improved to match effectively with higher-level demand, but also the invalid and repeated independent research and development should be avoided. Third, it is necessary to further strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights so as to effectively encourage independent innovation, especially for those technology leading domestic areas and some industries with advantages of independent research and development.

Key words: intellectual property transaction intensity, technology import, independent R&D, economic growth, intellectual property protection