Research on capital allocation efficiencies with four-dimensional factor capitals from China’s intelligent manufacturing enterprises

• Published in: PloS one 2022-07, Vol.17 (7), p.e0270588-e0270588
• Main Authors: Wang, Qiong, Geng, Chengxuan, E., Hai-tao, Song, Jiarui
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Business; Capital investments; Earth Sciences; Economic theory; Education; Efficiency; Engineering and Technology; Finance; Human capital; Intelligent manufacturing systems; Investments; Knowledge; Labor force; Literature reviews; Manufacturing; Manufacturing industry; Modelling; Physical Sciences; Production functions; Production management; Resource allocation; Social Sciences; Stochasticity
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270588

Compared with traditional manufacturing enterprises, intelligent manufacturing enterprises pay more attention to the investment of knowledge capital and technological capital. Taking 258 intelligent manufacturing listed companies in China from 2015 to 2020 as research samples, the paper selects the material capital, human capital, knowledge capital and technological capital of enterprises as the input variables of Cobb-Douglas production function. Considering that enterprises are often affected by spatial correlation, stochastic frontier panel model, spatial lag stochastic frontier panel model and dynamic spatial lag stochastic frontier panel model are constructed to measure capital allocation efficiencies of enterprises. The results show that all the factor capitals in the three models have a significant positive impact on enterprises’ performance, and the dual lag effect of time and space is significant. Moreover, it is more reasonable to use the dynamic spatial lag stochastic frontier panel model to estimate the parameters and measure capital allocation efficiencies. The development of intelligent manufacturing industry has significant space-time spillover effect among provinces. About 52.98% of intelligent manufacturing enterprises have high capital allocation efficiencies, but 12.04% still need to further optimize capital allocation. The gap between the actual performance of the sample enterprises and efficiency frontier is mainly due to technical ineffectiveness. From a regional perspective, the top ten enterprises with high capital allocation efficiencies are all in the eastern region, but the average of capital allocation efficiency is the highest in the western region, followed by the eastern and central regions.