The Analysis On The Effect Of National High-Tech Parks On Urban Economic Growth

National high-tech parks are operated as an important science and technology encouragement strategy.The meaning and importance of this policy can’t be denied,but we still need to recognize its insufficiency and do some evaluation.The ultimate goal of high-tech parks is improve local economic growth,so we focus research on this direction too.We choose Synthetic Control as main tool,which can recognize the effect ignored by DID.It also allows us calculate effect city by city,and make some comparison,but also avoid the potential damages caused by different time trend.We select data 1981-2012 with GDP per capita as indicator of economic growth,choose 24 cities which set up national high-tech parks in either 1991 or 1992 as treated group.Finally we simulate the potential growth trajectory for 24 treated units under the counterfactual hypothesis of no parks.Results show that under constant price index of 1991,9 of the 10 experimental city founded in 1991 get average positive effect in subsequent years,and the ratio in 1992-treatment group is 11/14.So we may conclude that national high-tech parks contribute to local economic growth at least on our sample.We also execute some robustness test.under permutation test we can judge that 9 of 10 cities which are significant in confidence level of 10%shows the positive effects;and under regression DID we also find that interaction is positive and significant,which also support above conclusion.In addition,we find something else based on analyzing process.By comparing with the real paths and the counterfactual paths,we find that large part of the national high-tech parks show economic boost performance after 3-5 years since establishment,and delay time of 1992 batches is significantly longer than 1991 batches.This finding is in conformity with the Ferrara’s results.We also notice that results have relationship with regional factor,because the cities in the original graphics for negative results are located in traditionally remote territories such as the northeast,northwest,southwest.Synthetic Control can’t help us explore the reasons behind the different effects further,but we initially make some comparisons and find that this may be correlated with operating scales of high-tech parks,and the deeper inquiry researches count on follow-up works.