Abstract:In the context of the development strategy of high-quality economic development and the construction of an innovative country, local governments actively use tangible hands to promote innovative development, either out of the need of promotion competition or out of the endogenous demand for innovative development. However, under the fiscal decentralization system, local governments with different fiscal expenditure preferences have different fiscal expenditure structures and expenditure efficiencies. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces and cities in China from 2011 to 2019, this paper adopts Tobit method to construct an econometric model from the perspective of innovation value chain and takes the fiscal expenditure structure and efficiency of local governments as intermediate variables to empirically test the influence mechanism and approach of fiscal decentralization on the two-stage regional innovation efficiency. The results show that fiscal decentralization has a significant negative direct effect on the regional innovation efficiency in the achievement transformation stage, but has no significant effect on the regional innovation efficiency in the r&d stage. The indirect effect of government expenditure structure covers up the restraining effect of fiscal decentralization on regional innovation efficiency to a certain extent, and the hiding effect is great in the stage of r&d. Fiscal decentralization will reduce the fiscal expenditure efficiency of local governments, which will inhibit the two-stage regional innovation efficiency.