Innovation contributes to the long-term economic growth. From the perspective of externality by innovation, this paper disentangles the spillover effect based on the regions’ abundance of innovation resource and separately identifies the “leader effect” and “peer effect” of innovation spillover and discusses their economic consequences. Empirical results demonstrate a negative spillover effect from innovation leaders on the economic growth and a positive spillover effect from innovation peers. Robustness checks also support main findings. This study has implication both in the endogenous economic growth theory and industry innovation practice.

This paper measures the contribution of information productivity to the economic growth by a revised Cobb-Douglas production function which takes capital, labor and information as three elements. The result shows that information productivity contributes the most to the economic growth. Meanwhile, we also compare China with other high income countries and find that information input has stronger multiplier effect in China than high income countries.