Impact of intellectual property protection on enterprise supply chain resilience: empirical evidence from China’s intellectual property pilot and demonstration city policy

Abstract

Abstract This study leverages China’s staggered implementation of the intellectual property pilot and demonstration city (IPPDC) policy as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the impact of intellectual property protection (IPP) on enterprise supply chain resilience (SCR). The empirical analysis reveals that the establishment of the IPPDC significantly enhances SCR by promoting innovation, improving technology diffusion capabilities, and fostering a cooperative culture within enterprises. Additionally, when enterprise innovation and technology diffusion are treated as threshold variables, the positive effects of IPP on SCR intensify, exhibiting a nonlinear and progressively increasing spillover effect. In contrast, the influence of IPP on SCR through enterprise cooperation follows a U-shaped trajectory, with an initial decline followed by a subsequent rise. These findings emphasize the importance of interactions between policy-makers and enterprises in strengthening supply chain responsibility. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that IPPDC policies have a stronger effect on enterprises with robust SCR, with more significant improvements in the creation of SCR than in resistance and recovery abilities. This effect is consistently observed across primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, with particularly substantial impacts in western China. Moreover, private enterprises benefit more from IPP policies than do state-owned enterprises. These findings provide valuable insights for policy-makers by demonstrating the practical implications of IPP policies beyond their theoretical constructs. This study underscores the critical role of IPP in fortifying SCR, ultimately strengthening firms’ global competitiveness and resilience amid rising geopolitical risk and global uncertainty.