创新政策是否驱动城市产业升级——基于多时点双重差分法的验证

Does Innovation Policy Drive Urban Industrial Upgrading? Evidence from Multi-period DID

摘要:

在全球经济转型升级和创新驱动高质量发展日益迫切的背景下,探讨创新驱动政策如何牵引城市产业结构的优化和升级,是切实实现中国式现代化和推进因地制宜发展新质生产力进程中的关键问题。本文将中国创新型城市试点政策作为一项准自然实验,利用2006—2019年281个地级市的面板数据,基于多时点双重差分模型,评估了该政策对城市产业结构调整的影响。 结果发现:①创新型城市试点政策显著推动了城市产业结构的高度化,但对产业结构合理化的作用并不显著。 这一结论通过了一系列稳健性检验。 ②异质性分析表明,政策效应在行政级别较高的城市、第三产业就业人数比重较高的城市、经济发展模式不完全依赖资源禀赋的城市及位于城市群经济带的城市中更为显著,更易实现产业结构高度化调整。 ③机制分析进一步表明,该政策通过扩大数字经济规模、优化资源配置效率及提升人力资本供给,对城市产业结构高度化产生了显著的正向作用。 研究结论从实证角度揭示了创新政策对产业结构优化的作用路径,并为提升政策施行效果、促进区域经济高质量发展提供了理论依据和实践参考。

Abstract:

Under the increasingly urgent background of global economic transformation, upgrading, and innovation-driven high-quality development, exploring how innovation-driven policies facilitate the optimization and upgrading of urban industrial structures has become crucial for realizing Chinese-style modernization and advancing the development of new productive forces tailored to local conditions. The pilot policy of innovative cities in China was treated as a quasi-natural experiment. Panel data from 281 prefecture-level cities between 2006 and 2019 were utilized, and a multi-period difference-in-differences ( DID ) model was employed to evaluate the policy’s impact on urban industrial restructuring. The results indicate that the innovative city pilot policy significantly promotes the sophistication of urban industrial structures, while its effect on industrial structure rationalization remains statistically insignificant. These findings are validated through a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis reveals more pronounced policy effects in cities with higher administrative levels, greater proportions of tertiary industry employment, development models not fully reliant on resource endowments, and those located within urban agglomeration economic belts. Mechanism analysis further demonstrates that the policy positively affects industrial structure sophistication through three channels: expanding the digital economy scale, optimizing resource allocation efficiency, and enhancing human capital supply. It empirically reveals the pathway through which innovation policies promote industrial structure optimization, providing both theoretical foundations and practical references for enhancing policy effectiveness and advancing high-quality regional economic development.