A Study On The Impact Of Innovative City Pilot Policies On Urban Competitiveness

China’s national strength and international status have improved significantly in recent years,but behind the rapid development,it has also brought China problems such as unbalanced urban development,uneven distribution of resources and difficulties in transformation,which have seriously restricted urban development and still have a large gap compared with cities in developed Western countries.In such a situation,the ability to improve the comprehensive competitiveness of cities determines their rise or fall.Innovation is becoming more and more important in China’s development,and under the leadership of the national innovation-driven policy,China’s innovation construction has also made great progress,and China has proposed the policy of "building innovative cities pilot" at the city level to meet the social development trend.Now that this policy has been implemented in China for decades,has this policy improved the competitiveness of the pilot cities? If so,through which path did the policy work? Are the effects of the policy the same across different types of cities?In order to answer these questions,this paper takes city competitiveness as the entry point,takes government intervention theory,innovation theory,competitive advantage theory,and policy evaluation theory as the theoretical basis,constructs a city competitiveness index system based on the urban panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2001 to2020,measures the weights of each index through principal component analysis and derives.The paper also constructs a double-difference model as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the effect of the pilot policy on innovative cities through empirical tests,and conducts impact mechanism tests,heterogeneity tests and robustness tests.The main conclusions of this paper are:(i)the pilot policy of innovative cities has a significant contribution to the improvement of city competitiveness,and this result still holds after several robustness tests such as placebo test,replacement experimental group test,and PSM-DID test;(ii)guiding talent clustering and policy clustering to improve city competitiveness is the main path for the pilot policy of innovative cities to exert its policy effect;(iii)the implementation effect of the pilot policy of innovative cities has a heterogeneous effect.The implementation effect of the pilot policy is heterogeneous and does not give full play to its universality,and the policy effect is influenced by the regional location of the city,the level of economic development of the city and the grade of the city.In general,the national innovative city pilot policy has promoted the competitiveness of cities to a large extent,but the effects are heterogeneous and complex.Based on the empirical findings,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations:(i)expand the scope of pilot cities to enhance policy effectiveness;(ii)support key cities to narrow city gaps;(iii)accurately locate city functions and formulate city development strategies according to local conditions;(iv)increase investment in scientific research and education to actively cultivate talents;(v)improve policy evaluation mechanisms and strengthen effective supervision of pilot cities;(vi)further explore pilot policies of innovative cities to enhance the city’s competitiveness,improve the evaluation system of city competitiveness,and enhance the comprehensive development level of the city in all aspects.