Abstract:  With the weakening of China’s demographic dividend and the increase of resource constraints, innovation has become a new driving force for economic growth. Previous researches have paid more attention to the role of innovation drive in the economic transformation and upgrading and there have been few researches on the ways of how innovation impacts regional economic disparity. This paper introduces innovation efficiency into the analysis framework of regional economic disparity. The results show that innovation efficiency has a significant positive impact on the latter. Since different regions vary in innovation endowments, the impact takes on regional heterogeneity. Innovation efficiency not only affects regional economic disparity directly, but also affects it indirectly by influencing entrepreneurship level. The direct effect is greater than the indirect effect. When the entrepreneurial level acts as the threshold variable, the effect of innovation efficiency on regional economic disparity has nonlinear characteristics. The improvement of entrepreneurial level makes the impact of innovation efficiency on regional economic disparity stronger.

Key words: Key words： innovation efficiency, regional economic disparity, panel model, entrepreneurial level